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[
"Mary Decker",
"The 1984 Olympic incident",
"what happened in 1984",
"Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics,",
"did he win?",
"As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race,",
"why not?",
"Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England.",
"did she win/",
"Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place."
] |
C_aa879cf55c4d4168ade04bf922d849a1_0
|
did she win any other races?
| 6 |
Aside from the 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre, did Mary Decker win any other races?
|
Mary Decker
|
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running barefoot side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. Track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of U.S. sports journalists, and Budd was hounded constantly in the press as a result, receiving a number of death threats. The claim was never accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF. Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack." Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time. She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games. CANNOTANSWER
|
Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar,
|
Mary Teresa Slaney (formerly Tabb, née Decker, born August 4, 1958) is a retired American middle-distance runner. During her career, she won gold medals in the 1500 meters and 3000 meters at the 1983 World Championships, and was the world record holder in the mile, 5000 meters and 10,000 meters. In total, she set 17 official and unofficial world records, including being the first woman in history to break 4:20 for the mile. She also set 36 US national records at distances ranging from 800 meters to 10,000 meters, and has held the US record in the mile, 2000 meters and 3000 meters since the early 1980s, while her 1500 meters record stood for 32 years. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
Early life
Mary Decker was born in Bunnvale, New Jersey. A decade later her family moved to Garden Grove in Southern California, where Decker started running. A year later, aged 11, she won her first local competition.
She joined her school athletics club and a local track club, and completely immersed herself in running, for which she would pay an injury-laden price later in her career. At age 12, she completed a marathon and four middle- and long-distance races in one week, ending the week with an appendectomy operation.
Career
In her early teens, Decker was already recognized as a world-class runner. Unable to attend the 1972 Olympics as she was too young, the pigtailed 14-year-old nicknamed "Little Mary Decker," won international acclaim in 1973 with a win in the 800 meters at a US-Soviet meet in Minsk, beating the reigning Olympic silver medallist, Nijolė Sabaitė.
By the end of 1972, Decker was ranked first in the United States and fourth in the world in the 800 meters. In 1973 she gained her first world record, running an indoor mile in 4:40.1. By 1974, Decker was the world Indoor record holder with 2:02.4 for 880 yards, and 2:01.8 for 800 meters.
By the end of 1974, she had developed a case of the muscle condition compartment syndrome. This resulted in a series of injuries, which meant that she did not compete in the 1976 Olympics, because of stress fractures in her lower leg. In 1978 she had an operation to try to cure compartment syndrome, which kept her out of competition for a period. After recovering from surgery, she spent two seasons at the University of Colorado at Boulder on a track scholarship. In 1979, she became the second American woman (the first was Francie Larrieu) to break the 4:30 mile in American record time. Decker was the first woman to break the 4:20 barrier for the mile in 1980 when she ran it in 4:17.55. However, this time was never ratified by the IAAF. She did not compete at the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the American boycott. She did however receive one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the US athletes.
In 1981 she married fellow American distance runner Ron Tabb. The couple divorced in 1983. In 1982, under the name Mary Tabb, she ran the mile in 4:18.08, breaking the official record of 4:20.89 by the Soviet Lyudmila Veselkova. This time was ratified.
Career peak
In 1982 Decker-Tabb set six world records, at distances ranging from the mile run to 10,000 meters. She received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States.
The following year she achieved the "Double Decker," winning both the 1500 meters and 3000 meters events at the World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. Her history of relatively easy wins in the United States left her tactical abilities suspect in Helsinki, as she chose not to run in close order because so few athletes could keep up with her, a situation that the Soviet runners hoped to use to their advantage. Her wins against Soviet World Record holders proved a redemption of her competitive guile. After her double win she won the Jesse Owens Award from USA Track and Field and Sports Illustrated magazine named her Sportsperson of the Year. Shortly before her World Championship victories, Decker improved her U.S. 1500 meters record to 3:57.12 in Stockholm on July 26, 1983. This record stood for 32 years until Shannon Rowbury ran 3:56.29 on July 17, 2015.
The 1984 Olympic incident
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, barefoot runner Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb, injuring her hip. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. International track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of sports journalists. The claim was not accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF.
Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack."
Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time.
She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games.
Doping controversy
In 1996, at the age of 37, as she qualified for the 5000 meters at the Atlanta Olympics, a urine test taken in June at the Olympic Trials showed a testosterone to epitestosterone (T/E) ratio greater than the allowable maximum of six to one. At the time of the positive test Decker was being coached by Alberto Salazar.
Decker and her lawyers contended that the T/E ratio test is unreliable for women, especially women in their late 30s or older who are taking birth control pills. In the meantime, Decker was eliminated in the heats at the Olympics.
In June 1997, the IAAF banned Decker from competition. In September 1999, a USATF panel reinstated her. The IAAF cleared her to compete but took the case to arbitration. In April 1999, the arbitration panel ruled against her, after which the IAAF – through a retroactive ban, even though she was cleared to compete – stripped her of a silver medal she had won in the 1500 meters at the 1997 World Indoor Championships.
In April 1999, Decker filed suit against both the IAAF and the U.S. Olympic Committee which administered the test, arguing that the test is flawed and cannot distinguish between androgens caused by the use of banned substances and androgens resulting from the use of birth control pills. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction, a decision that was upheld on appeal.
The (T/E) ratio test has seen its standards tightened to a 4:1 ratio, instead of the previous 6:1 ratio, and laboratories now also run a carbon isotope ratio test (CIR) if the ratio is unusually high.
Later life
Throughout her later career, Decker had suffered a series of stress induced fractures. After the loss of her 1999 legal case, she agreed to have a series of more than 30 orthopedic procedures, mainly on her legs and feet, in an attempt to enable her to run competitively in marathons. However, the surgery increased the occurrence of the problems. As a result, she retired with her husband to a property in Eugene, Oregon, where she jogs every other day.
International competitions
See also
List of sportspeople sanctioned for doping offences
References
External links
California State Records before 2000
1958 births
Living people
People from Lebanon Township, New Jersey
Track and field athletes from California
Track and field athletes from New Jersey
American female middle-distance runners
American masters athletes
Olympic track and field athletes of the United States
Athletes (track and field) at the 1984 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1988 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1996 Summer Olympics
Pan American Games track and field athletes for the United States
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in athletics (track and field)
Athletes (track and field) at the 1979 Pan American Games
World Athletics Championships athletes for the United States
World record setters in athletics (track and field)
World Athletics Championships medalists
American sportspeople in doping cases
Doping cases in athletics
James E. Sullivan Award recipients
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
University of Colorado alumni
World Athletics Championships winners
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
| true |
[
"Smok'n Frolic (foaled April 9th, 1999) is an American Thoroughbred racehorse and the winner of the Next Move Handicap.\n\nCareer\n\nSmok'n Frolic's first race was on April 13th, 2001, at Keeneland, where he came in fourth. She then won her next two races at Belmont Park, winning a Maiden Special Weight race and the 2001 Fashion Stakes\n\nShe raced in the Spinaway Stakes coming in 2nd, and picked up his first graded win at the 2001 Tempted Stakes. She followed that victory up with another win the following month at the 2001 Demoiselle Stakes.\n\nShe competed in multiple stakes races throughout 2002, but did not win any until she won the 2001 Cotillion Handicap in October. \n\nShe started off 2003 with a January win at the Vessels Stallion Farm Distaff Stakes. She then picked up another graded win in March at the 2003 Next Move Handicap. She won the 2003 Turfway Breeders' Cup Stakes, which was the last win of her season.\n\nHer final win took place on March 14th, 2004 at the Next Move Handicap. She continued racing until she finished her career off with a 5th place finish at the Ballerina Handicap.\n\nPedigree\n\nReferences\n\n1999 racehorse births",
"The 1954 Challenge Desgrange-Colombo was the seventh edition of the Challenge Desgrange-Colombo. It included eleven races: all the races form the 1953 edition were retained with no additions. Ferdinand Kübler won his third individual championship (although he did not win any of the races) while Belgium won the nations championship.\n\nRaces\n\nFinal standings\n\nRiders\n\nNations\n\nReferences\n\n \nChallenge Desgrange-Colombo\nChallenge Desgrange-Colombo"
] |
[
"Mary Decker",
"The 1984 Olympic incident",
"what happened in 1984",
"Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics,",
"did he win?",
"As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race,",
"why not?",
"Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England.",
"did she win/",
"Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place.",
"did she win any other races?",
"Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar,"
] |
C_aa879cf55c4d4168ade04bf922d849a1_0
|
did she win any awards?
| 7 |
Did Mary Decker win any awards?
|
Mary Decker
|
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running barefoot side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. Track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of U.S. sports journalists, and Budd was hounded constantly in the press as a result, receiving a number of death threats. The claim was never accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF. Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack." Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time. She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games. CANNOTANSWER
|
She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal.
|
Mary Teresa Slaney (formerly Tabb, née Decker, born August 4, 1958) is a retired American middle-distance runner. During her career, she won gold medals in the 1500 meters and 3000 meters at the 1983 World Championships, and was the world record holder in the mile, 5000 meters and 10,000 meters. In total, she set 17 official and unofficial world records, including being the first woman in history to break 4:20 for the mile. She also set 36 US national records at distances ranging from 800 meters to 10,000 meters, and has held the US record in the mile, 2000 meters and 3000 meters since the early 1980s, while her 1500 meters record stood for 32 years. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
Early life
Mary Decker was born in Bunnvale, New Jersey. A decade later her family moved to Garden Grove in Southern California, where Decker started running. A year later, aged 11, she won her first local competition.
She joined her school athletics club and a local track club, and completely immersed herself in running, for which she would pay an injury-laden price later in her career. At age 12, she completed a marathon and four middle- and long-distance races in one week, ending the week with an appendectomy operation.
Career
In her early teens, Decker was already recognized as a world-class runner. Unable to attend the 1972 Olympics as she was too young, the pigtailed 14-year-old nicknamed "Little Mary Decker," won international acclaim in 1973 with a win in the 800 meters at a US-Soviet meet in Minsk, beating the reigning Olympic silver medallist, Nijolė Sabaitė.
By the end of 1972, Decker was ranked first in the United States and fourth in the world in the 800 meters. In 1973 she gained her first world record, running an indoor mile in 4:40.1. By 1974, Decker was the world Indoor record holder with 2:02.4 for 880 yards, and 2:01.8 for 800 meters.
By the end of 1974, she had developed a case of the muscle condition compartment syndrome. This resulted in a series of injuries, which meant that she did not compete in the 1976 Olympics, because of stress fractures in her lower leg. In 1978 she had an operation to try to cure compartment syndrome, which kept her out of competition for a period. After recovering from surgery, she spent two seasons at the University of Colorado at Boulder on a track scholarship. In 1979, she became the second American woman (the first was Francie Larrieu) to break the 4:30 mile in American record time. Decker was the first woman to break the 4:20 barrier for the mile in 1980 when she ran it in 4:17.55. However, this time was never ratified by the IAAF. She did not compete at the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the American boycott. She did however receive one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the US athletes.
In 1981 she married fellow American distance runner Ron Tabb. The couple divorced in 1983. In 1982, under the name Mary Tabb, she ran the mile in 4:18.08, breaking the official record of 4:20.89 by the Soviet Lyudmila Veselkova. This time was ratified.
Career peak
In 1982 Decker-Tabb set six world records, at distances ranging from the mile run to 10,000 meters. She received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States.
The following year she achieved the "Double Decker," winning both the 1500 meters and 3000 meters events at the World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. Her history of relatively easy wins in the United States left her tactical abilities suspect in Helsinki, as she chose not to run in close order because so few athletes could keep up with her, a situation that the Soviet runners hoped to use to their advantage. Her wins against Soviet World Record holders proved a redemption of her competitive guile. After her double win she won the Jesse Owens Award from USA Track and Field and Sports Illustrated magazine named her Sportsperson of the Year. Shortly before her World Championship victories, Decker improved her U.S. 1500 meters record to 3:57.12 in Stockholm on July 26, 1983. This record stood for 32 years until Shannon Rowbury ran 3:56.29 on July 17, 2015.
The 1984 Olympic incident
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, barefoot runner Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb, injuring her hip. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. International track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of sports journalists. The claim was not accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF.
Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack."
Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time.
She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games.
Doping controversy
In 1996, at the age of 37, as she qualified for the 5000 meters at the Atlanta Olympics, a urine test taken in June at the Olympic Trials showed a testosterone to epitestosterone (T/E) ratio greater than the allowable maximum of six to one. At the time of the positive test Decker was being coached by Alberto Salazar.
Decker and her lawyers contended that the T/E ratio test is unreliable for women, especially women in their late 30s or older who are taking birth control pills. In the meantime, Decker was eliminated in the heats at the Olympics.
In June 1997, the IAAF banned Decker from competition. In September 1999, a USATF panel reinstated her. The IAAF cleared her to compete but took the case to arbitration. In April 1999, the arbitration panel ruled against her, after which the IAAF – through a retroactive ban, even though she was cleared to compete – stripped her of a silver medal she had won in the 1500 meters at the 1997 World Indoor Championships.
In April 1999, Decker filed suit against both the IAAF and the U.S. Olympic Committee which administered the test, arguing that the test is flawed and cannot distinguish between androgens caused by the use of banned substances and androgens resulting from the use of birth control pills. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction, a decision that was upheld on appeal.
The (T/E) ratio test has seen its standards tightened to a 4:1 ratio, instead of the previous 6:1 ratio, and laboratories now also run a carbon isotope ratio test (CIR) if the ratio is unusually high.
Later life
Throughout her later career, Decker had suffered a series of stress induced fractures. After the loss of her 1999 legal case, she agreed to have a series of more than 30 orthopedic procedures, mainly on her legs and feet, in an attempt to enable her to run competitively in marathons. However, the surgery increased the occurrence of the problems. As a result, she retired with her husband to a property in Eugene, Oregon, where she jogs every other day.
International competitions
See also
List of sportspeople sanctioned for doping offences
References
External links
California State Records before 2000
1958 births
Living people
People from Lebanon Township, New Jersey
Track and field athletes from California
Track and field athletes from New Jersey
American female middle-distance runners
American masters athletes
Olympic track and field athletes of the United States
Athletes (track and field) at the 1984 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1988 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1996 Summer Olympics
Pan American Games track and field athletes for the United States
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in athletics (track and field)
Athletes (track and field) at the 1979 Pan American Games
World Athletics Championships athletes for the United States
World record setters in athletics (track and field)
World Athletics Championships medalists
American sportspeople in doping cases
Doping cases in athletics
James E. Sullivan Award recipients
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
University of Colorado alumni
World Athletics Championships winners
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
| true |
[
"Nena Danevic is a film editor who was nominated at the 57th Academy Awards for Best Film Editing. She was nominated for Amadeus. She shared her nomination with Michael Chandler.\n\nShe did win at the 39th British Academy Film Awards for Best Editing. Also for Amadeus with Michael Chandler.\n\nShe also won at the American Cinema Editors awards.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nBest Editing BAFTA Award winners\nFilm editors\nPossibly living people\nYear of birth missing (living people)",
"Sheena Napier is a British costume designer who was nominated at the 65th Academy Awards for her work on the film Enchanted April, for which she was nominated for Best Costumes.\n\nIn addition she did win at the BAFTA Television Awards for the TV film Parade's End, which she was also nominated for an Emmy for.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nBritish costume designers\nLiving people\nBAFTA winners (people)\nWomen costume designers\nYear of birth missing (living people)"
] |
[
"Mary Decker",
"The 1984 Olympic incident",
"what happened in 1984",
"Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics,",
"did he win?",
"As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race,",
"why not?",
"Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England.",
"did she win/",
"Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place.",
"did she win any other races?",
"Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar,",
"did she win any awards?",
"She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal."
] |
C_aa879cf55c4d4168ade04bf922d849a1_0
|
what did she do next?
| 8 |
After the 1988 Summer Olympics, what did Mary Decker do next?
|
Mary Decker
|
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running barefoot side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. Track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of U.S. sports journalists, and Budd was hounded constantly in the press as a result, receiving a number of death threats. The claim was never accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF. Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack." Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time. She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games. CANNOTANSWER
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She did not qualify for the 1992 Games.
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Mary Teresa Slaney (formerly Tabb, née Decker, born August 4, 1958) is a retired American middle-distance runner. During her career, she won gold medals in the 1500 meters and 3000 meters at the 1983 World Championships, and was the world record holder in the mile, 5000 meters and 10,000 meters. In total, she set 17 official and unofficial world records, including being the first woman in history to break 4:20 for the mile. She also set 36 US national records at distances ranging from 800 meters to 10,000 meters, and has held the US record in the mile, 2000 meters and 3000 meters since the early 1980s, while her 1500 meters record stood for 32 years. In 2003, she was inducted into the National Track and Field Hall of Fame.
Early life
Mary Decker was born in Bunnvale, New Jersey. A decade later her family moved to Garden Grove in Southern California, where Decker started running. A year later, aged 11, she won her first local competition.
She joined her school athletics club and a local track club, and completely immersed herself in running, for which she would pay an injury-laden price later in her career. At age 12, she completed a marathon and four middle- and long-distance races in one week, ending the week with an appendectomy operation.
Career
In her early teens, Decker was already recognized as a world-class runner. Unable to attend the 1972 Olympics as she was too young, the pigtailed 14-year-old nicknamed "Little Mary Decker," won international acclaim in 1973 with a win in the 800 meters at a US-Soviet meet in Minsk, beating the reigning Olympic silver medallist, Nijolė Sabaitė.
By the end of 1972, Decker was ranked first in the United States and fourth in the world in the 800 meters. In 1973 she gained her first world record, running an indoor mile in 4:40.1. By 1974, Decker was the world Indoor record holder with 2:02.4 for 880 yards, and 2:01.8 for 800 meters.
By the end of 1974, she had developed a case of the muscle condition compartment syndrome. This resulted in a series of injuries, which meant that she did not compete in the 1976 Olympics, because of stress fractures in her lower leg. In 1978 she had an operation to try to cure compartment syndrome, which kept her out of competition for a period. After recovering from surgery, she spent two seasons at the University of Colorado at Boulder on a track scholarship. In 1979, she became the second American woman (the first was Francie Larrieu) to break the 4:30 mile in American record time. Decker was the first woman to break the 4:20 barrier for the mile in 1980 when she ran it in 4:17.55. However, this time was never ratified by the IAAF. She did not compete at the 1980 Moscow Olympics due to the American boycott. She did however receive one of 461 Congressional Gold Medals created especially for the US athletes.
In 1981 she married fellow American distance runner Ron Tabb. The couple divorced in 1983. In 1982, under the name Mary Tabb, she ran the mile in 4:18.08, breaking the official record of 4:20.89 by the Soviet Lyudmila Veselkova. This time was ratified.
Career peak
In 1982 Decker-Tabb set six world records, at distances ranging from the mile run to 10,000 meters. She received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States.
The following year she achieved the "Double Decker," winning both the 1500 meters and 3000 meters events at the World Championships in Helsinki, Finland. Her history of relatively easy wins in the United States left her tactical abilities suspect in Helsinki, as she chose not to run in close order because so few athletes could keep up with her, a situation that the Soviet runners hoped to use to their advantage. Her wins against Soviet World Record holders proved a redemption of her competitive guile. After her double win she won the Jesse Owens Award from USA Track and Field and Sports Illustrated magazine named her Sportsperson of the Year. Shortly before her World Championship victories, Decker improved her U.S. 1500 meters record to 3:57.12 in Stockholm on July 26, 1983. This record stood for 32 years until Shannon Rowbury ran 3:56.29 on July 17, 2015.
The 1984 Olympic incident
Decker was heavily favored to win a gold medal in the 3000 meters run at the 1984 Summer Olympics, held at Los Angeles. In the final, barefoot runner Zola Budd, representing Great Britain, had been running side by side with Decker for three laps and moved ahead. In an attempt to put pressure on Budd, Decker remained close by in a crowded space. Decker stood on Budd, then shortly after, collided with the barefoot runner and fell spectacularly to the curb, injuring her hip. As a result, Mary Decker did not finish the race, which was won by Maricica Puica of Romania (Budd finished seventh). Decker was carried off the track in tears by her boyfriend (and later, husband), British discus thrower Richard Slaney. At a press conference she said that Budd was to blame for the collision. While it is generally the trailing athlete's responsibility to avoid contact with the runner ahead, it is also an accepted convention among most distance runners that the leader be a full stride ahead before cutting in. International track officials initially disqualified Budd for obstruction, but she was reinstated just one hour later once officials had viewed films of the race. Despite being behind Budd, Decker's claim that Budd had bumped into her leg was supported by a number of sports journalists. The claim was not accepted by the director of the games or the IAAF.
Decker and Budd next met in July 1985, in a 3000 meters race at Crystal Palace National Sports Centre in London, England. Decker won the race, and Budd finished in fourth place. After the race, the two women shook hands and made up. Decker later went on record as claiming that she was unfairly robbed of the LA 3000 meters gold medal by Budd, but said many years after the event "The reason I fell, some people think she tripped me deliberately. I happen to know that wasn't the case at all. The reason I fell is because I am and was very inexperienced in running in a pack."
Decker had a successful 1985 season, winning twelve mile and 3000 meters races in the European athletics calendar, which included a new official world record for the women's mile of 4:16.71 in Zurich (Natalya Artyomova's 4:15.8 in 1984, not being ratified by the IAAF). Since that race in 1985, her time has only been bettered on four occasions. That race in Zurich also matched her with both of the other principle athletes from the Olympic race, Slaney vanquishing both Puica and Budd who themselves ran times that until July 9, 2017 also ranked in the top 10 of all time.
She sat out the 1986 season to give birth to her only child, daughter Ashley Lynn (born May 30, 1986), but missed the 1987 season due to injury. She qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, but failed to win a medal. She did not qualify for the 1992 Games.
Doping controversy
In 1996, at the age of 37, as she qualified for the 5000 meters at the Atlanta Olympics, a urine test taken in June at the Olympic Trials showed a testosterone to epitestosterone (T/E) ratio greater than the allowable maximum of six to one. At the time of the positive test Decker was being coached by Alberto Salazar.
Decker and her lawyers contended that the T/E ratio test is unreliable for women, especially women in their late 30s or older who are taking birth control pills. In the meantime, Decker was eliminated in the heats at the Olympics.
In June 1997, the IAAF banned Decker from competition. In September 1999, a USATF panel reinstated her. The IAAF cleared her to compete but took the case to arbitration. In April 1999, the arbitration panel ruled against her, after which the IAAF – through a retroactive ban, even though she was cleared to compete – stripped her of a silver medal she had won in the 1500 meters at the 1997 World Indoor Championships.
In April 1999, Decker filed suit against both the IAAF and the U.S. Olympic Committee which administered the test, arguing that the test is flawed and cannot distinguish between androgens caused by the use of banned substances and androgens resulting from the use of birth control pills. The court ruled that it had no jurisdiction, a decision that was upheld on appeal.
The (T/E) ratio test has seen its standards tightened to a 4:1 ratio, instead of the previous 6:1 ratio, and laboratories now also run a carbon isotope ratio test (CIR) if the ratio is unusually high.
Later life
Throughout her later career, Decker had suffered a series of stress induced fractures. After the loss of her 1999 legal case, she agreed to have a series of more than 30 orthopedic procedures, mainly on her legs and feet, in an attempt to enable her to run competitively in marathons. However, the surgery increased the occurrence of the problems. As a result, she retired with her husband to a property in Eugene, Oregon, where she jogs every other day.
International competitions
See also
List of sportspeople sanctioned for doping offences
References
External links
California State Records before 2000
1958 births
Living people
People from Lebanon Township, New Jersey
Track and field athletes from California
Track and field athletes from New Jersey
American female middle-distance runners
American masters athletes
Olympic track and field athletes of the United States
Athletes (track and field) at the 1984 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1988 Summer Olympics
Athletes (track and field) at the 1996 Summer Olympics
Pan American Games track and field athletes for the United States
Pan American Games gold medalists for the United States
Pan American Games medalists in athletics (track and field)
Athletes (track and field) at the 1979 Pan American Games
World Athletics Championships athletes for the United States
World record setters in athletics (track and field)
World Athletics Championships medalists
American sportspeople in doping cases
Doping cases in athletics
James E. Sullivan Award recipients
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
University of Colorado alumni
World Athletics Championships winners
Medalists at the 1979 Pan American Games
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"Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday? is a 1963 children's book published by Beginner Books and written by Helen Palmer Geisel, the first wife of Theodor Seuss Geisel (Dr. Seuss). Unlike most of the Beginner Books, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday? did not follow the format of text with inline drawings, being illustrated with black-and-white photographs by Lynn Fayman, featuring a boy named Rawli Davis. It is sometimes misattributed to Dr. Seuss himself. The book's cover features a photograph of a young boy sitting at a breakfast table with a huge pile of pancakes.\n\nActivities mentioned in the book include bowling, water skiing, marching, boxing, and shooting guns with the United States Marines, and eating more spaghetti \"than anyone else has eaten before.\n\nHelen Palmer's photograph-based children's books did not prove to be as popular as the more traditional text-and-illustrations format; however, Do You Know What I'm Going To Do Next Saturday received positive reviews and was listed by The New York Times as one of the best children's books of 1963. The book is currently out of print.\n\nReferences\n\n1963 children's books\nAmerican picture books",
"I Know What You Did Last Summer is a 1997 American slasher film based on the 1973 novel.\n\nI Know What You Did Last Summer may also refer to:\n\nFranchise\nI Know What You Did Last Summer (novel), a 1973 suspense novel for young adults by Lois Duncan\nI Know What You Did Last Summer (franchise)\nI Still Know What You Did Last Summer, a 1998 slasher film and a sequel to the 1997 film\nI'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, a 2006 horror film released straight to DVD and the third installment in the series\nI Know What You Did Last Summer (TV series), a 2021 Amazon Prime TV series\n\nOther uses\n\"I Know What You Did Last Summer\" (Supernatural), an episode of the TV series Supernatural\n\"I Know What You Did Last Summer\" (The Vampire Diaries), an episode of the TV series The Vampire Diaries\n\"I Know What You Did Last Summer\" (Scream), an episode of the TV series Scream\n\"I Know What You Did Last Summer (song)\", a 2015 song by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello\n\"I Know What You Did Last Summer\", a 2015 song by Jacob Whitesides featuring Kelly Rowland\n\nSee also\nI Know What You'll Do Next Summer, a third-season episode of the mystery series Veronica Mars"
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"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record"
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C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
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How did some of the members feel about the record?
| 1 |
How did some of the members of Queen feel about the record Bohemian Rhapsody?
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Bohemian Rhapsody
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I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
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"\"How Does It Feel\" is song by the British rock band Slade, released in 1975 as the second single from the band's first soundtrack album and fifth studio album Slade in Flame, in promotion of the film of the same name. The song was written by lead vocalist Noddy Holder and bassist Jim Lea, and produced by Chas Chandler. It reached No. 15 in the UK, remaining in the charts for seven weeks.\n\nBackground\nBy 1974, Slade had become a big success in the UK, Europe and beyond; however the band felt that continuing to provide 'more of the same' was not what they wanted to do. Their manager Chas Chandler suggested they do a movie, to which the band agreed. To accompany the film, Holder and Lea began writing material for a soundtrack album, which would continue to see the band break out of their successful formula and try different musical ideas. In late 1974, the lead single \"Far Far Away\" had reached No. 2, while Slade in Flame peaked at No. 6. Following the film's release in January 1975, it was decided to release \"How Does It Feel\" as the second single the following month. It reached No. 15, which was the band's first single not to reach the UK Top 5 since their 1971 breakthrough with \"Get Down and Get with It\".\n\nThe melody of \"How Does It Feel\" was the first Lea had ever written, while he was still in school. He came up with the idea on an old piano which he later described as having half the keys missing. Although the tune never developed any further at that time, Lea later revisited it for use as the theme tune for Flame. Holder wrote the song's lyrics and it became \"How Does It Feel\". The song featured a brass section, performed by members of Gonzalez. In the band's 1984 biography Feel the Noize!, Lea recalled: \"It was an old song that I'd written and Nod put some great lyrics to it. Tommy Vance said that it was good but that we were in for a hard time. But it didn't matter to me whether it was number one or number 15... to me it was a much better record than we'd made before and that was all I cared about.\"\n\nDespite the song's disappointing charting, \"How Does It Feel\" is now widely considered as one of the band's finest songs. In 1999, Noel Gallagher of Oasis said the song was \"one of the best songs written, in the history of pop, ever\". In a 1986 fan club interview, guitarist Dave Hill spoke of the song: \"It was totally different to anything we had ever done before, but you see we were capable of that sort of thing, though our manager/producer Chas Chandler used to keep us clear from that. Trying to be too clever was considered at the time to be going in another direction.\"\n\nRelease\n\"How Does It Feel\" was released on 7\" vinyl by Polydor Records in the UK, Ireland, across Europe, Scandinavia, Yugoslavia, Australia and Japan. In America, it was released by Warner Bros. Records in September 1975. The B-side on the Polydor releases of the single was the Slade in Flame album track \"So Far So Good\". In America, \"O.K. Yesterday Was Yesterday\" featured as the B-side, also taken from Slade in Flame. In the UK, the first 200,000 copies of the single featured a colour sleeve.\n\nPromotion\nNo music video was created to promote the single. In the UK, the band performed the song on the music show Top of the Pops, The Russell Harty Show and the children's show Crackerjack. The band also performed the song on the Dutch AVRO TV show TopPop.\n\nCritical reception\nUpon release, Record Mirror noted the song was \"very different\" from Slade's usual sound, with \"far less reliance on guitars and far more on an orchestral arrangement\". Disc said the song was one of Slade's best, commented: \"Starting quietly it builds up, simmers down, flares up and so on\". American magazine Cash Box listed the single as one of their \"picks of the week\" during August 1975. They described the song as an \"effective, almost ballad-like, single\" with \"effective vocals and tight licks\".\n\nIn a review of the Slade in Flame album, Record Mirror said: \"\"How Does It Feel\" has a slower relaxed beat with grasping dramatic vocals delivered with as much feeling as Sir Larry's \"Richard III\".\" Disc said: \"For once Noddy's voice is allowed to take almost total precedence and the result is a poignant and unusual number.\" In a retrospective review of the album, Geoff Ginsberg of AllMusic commented: \"From the opening number, \"How Does It Feel,\" Slade sets a different tone\".\n\nFormats\n7\" single\n\"How Does It Feel\" - 4:46\n\"So Far So Good\" - 2:59\n\n7\" single (US release)\n\"How Does It Feel\" - 3:15\n\"O.K. Yesterday Was Yesterday\" - 3:58\n\n7\" single (US promo)\n\"How Does It Feel\" - 3:15\n\"How Does It Feel\" - 3:15\n\nChart performance\n\nCover versions\n In 2001, English rock vocalist Chris Farlowe recorded a version of the track for the tribute album Slade Remade.\n In 2006, English rock group Def Leppard released their own version of the song as an iTunes exclusive bonus track for their album Yeah!.\nIn 2016, English singer-songwriter James Blunt performed a version of the song as part of his set at the opening ceremony of the 2016 Invictus Games in Orlando, Florida.\nIn 2017, British singer Joanna Forest released her own version of the song on her debut album Stars Are Rising. It was released as the album's first single.\n\nPersonnel\nSlade\nNoddy Holder - lead vocals, guitar\nDave Hill - lead guitar, backing vocals\nJim Lea - bass, piano, organ, flute, backing vocals\nDon Powell - drums\n\nAdditional personnel\nMembers of Gonzalez - brass section\nChas Chandler - producer\n\nReferences\n\n1975 singles\n1975 songs\nSlade songs\nSongs written by Noddy Holder\nSongs written by Jim Lea\nSong recordings produced by Chas Chandler\nPolydor Records singles",
"\"Do the Funky Chicken\" is a song written and recorded by American R&B singer and entertainer Rufus Thomas for Stax Records in 1969. It became one of his biggest hits, reaching #5 on the R&B chart in early 1970, #28 on the US pop chart, and #18 in Britain where it was his only chart hit.\n\nThe record was one of a series of novelty dance hits for Thomas. He improvised the song after performing with Willie Mitchell's band at the University of Tennessee, developing it further at a gig in Covington. Thomas said: I did it in the middle of doing another song... and the words just started to come. I don't know how, they just came out of the blue. I just separated it. 'You raise your left arm up, and your right arm too.' When you're doing the funky chicken you use both arms. You don't just use one. It just happened I separated it. Then I put a little rhythm in between it. The same pattern that you heard on 'The Dog' is here on 'The Funky Chicken' but it is cut in half. That's how it came about.\n\nThomas added a spoken word section that he regularly used as a shtick as a radio DJ: \"Oh I feel so unnecessary - this is the kind of stuff that makes you feel like you wanna do something nasty, like waste some chicken gravy on your white shirt right down front.\" The recording was produced by Al Bell and Tom Nixon, and the instrumental backing was by the Bar-Kays, featuring guitarist Michael Toles. \n\nReviewer Stewart Mason described the \"Funky Chicken\" as \"the single goofiest dance craze of the 1970s... While Thomas clearly knows how silly the entire concept is – he starts the record off with his impersonation of a cackling hen – he doesn't let that stop him from getting behind those goofy lyrics and giving them everything he's got....\"\n\nThe song was used as the title track of Thomas' 1970 LP, Do The Funky Chicken. It was sampled by Eazy-E on his 1988 track \"Still Talkin'\", and by Missy Elliott in 1997 on \"Don't Be Commin' (In My Face)\".\n\nSee also\nChicken (dance)\n \"Funky Gibbon\"\n\nReferences\n\n1969 singles\nRufus Thomas songs\nStax Records singles\nSongs about dancing\nNovelty and fad dances"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,"
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C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
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Who almost rejected it?
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Who almost rejected Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen?
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Bohemian Rhapsody
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I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
| false |
[
"A referendum on becoming an overseas Territory was held in Mayotte on 11 April 1976, after the proposal of remaining part of the Comoros was rejected in a referendum in February. The proposal was rejected by 97.46% of voters, with almost 14,000 of the 17,384 votes being cast as invalid.\n\nResults\n\nReferences\n\n1976 referendums\nReferendums in Mayotte\n1976 in Mayotte\nApril 1976 events in Africa",
"\n\nPlants\n\nAngiosperms\n\nArthropods\n\nInsects\n\nMollusca\n\nNewly named bivalves\n\nArchosauromorphs\n Sankar Chatterjee's discovery of a possible Triassic bird, Protoavis, if genuine, would push avian origins back almost 70 million years. The find ignites controversy over the connection between dinosaurs and birds.\n\nNewly named dinosaurs\nData courtesy of George Olshevsky's dinosaur genera list.\n\nNewly named birds\n\nGenera no longer considered to be birds\n Protoavis. The avian status of Protoavis has since been almost universally rejected by paleontologists.\n\nPterosaurs\n\nNew taxa\n\nSynapsids\n\nNon-mammalian\n\nReferences\n\n \n1990s in paleontology\nPaleontology"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
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What were some of the other members feelings about it?
| 3 |
What were some of the other members of Queen's feelings about Bohemian Rhapsody other than almost rejecting the song?
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Bohemian Rhapsody
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I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
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"Feeling was originally used to describe the physical sensation of touch through either experience or perception. The word is also used to describe other experiences, such as \"a feeling of warmth\" and of sentience in general. In psychology, the term feeling is closely related to emotion, and usually refers to the conscious subjective experience of emotions. The study of subjective experiences is referred to as phenomenology, whereas psychotherapy refers to a process whereby a therapist helps a client understand their own feelings and experiences. Feelings are also known as a state of consciousness.\n\nHistory\n\nEmotions (in relation to feelings)\n\nDifference between feelings from emotions \nThe neuroscientist Antonio Damasio distinguishes between emotions and feelings: Emotions refer to mental images (i.e. representing either internal or external states of reality) and the bodily changes accompanying them, whereas feelings refer to the perception of bodily changes. In other words, emotions contain a subjective element and a 3rd person observable element, whereas feelings are subjective and private.\n\nEmotion regulation \n\nThere are two main types of emotion work: evocation and suppression. Evocation is used to obtain or bring up a certain feeling and suppression is used to put away or hide certain unwanted feelings. Emotion work is done by an individual, others upon them, or them upon others. Emotion work is done to achieve a certain feeling that one believes one should feel.\n\nThree more specific types of emotion work are cognitive, bodily, and expressive. Cognitive changes images, bodily changes physical aspects, and expressive changes gestures. A person who is sad uses expressive emotion work to lift their spirits by trying to smile. A person who is stressed may use bodily emotion work by, for example, trying to breathe slower in order to lower stress levels. \n\nEmotion work allows individuals to change their feelings so that the emotions suit the current situation (or are deemed appropriate). Since individuals want to fit in and be seen as normal, they are constantly working on their feelings in order to fit the situations they are in.\n\nSocial class \nClass differences influence and varies how a parent raises their child. Middle-class parents tend to raise their child through the use of feelings and lower-class parents tend to raise their children through behavior control. Middle-class parents and lower-class parents raise their children to be like them feeling and behavioral wise. Middle-class children get reprimanded for feeling the wrong way and lower-class children are punished for behaving badly.\n\nLionel Trilling, an author and literary critic, described the technique that the middle- and the lower-class parents use. Under-working and overworking their children's feelings causes them to seek approval of their feelings in the future. When children of lower-class and of working-class families join the workforce, they are less prepared for emotional management than middle-class children. However, the working-class and the middle-class tend to complain of over-management or micromanagement of feelings that distract them from actual work.\n\nSensations\n\nSensation occurs when sense organs collect various stimuli (such as a sound or smell) for transduction, meaning transformation into a form that can be understood by the nervous system.\n\nInteroception\n\nGut\n\nA gut feeling, or gut reaction, is a visceral emotional reaction to something. It may be negative, such as a feeling of uneasiness, or positive, such as a feeling of trust. Gut feelings are generally regarded as not modulated by conscious thought, but sometimes as a feature of intuition rather than rationality. The idea that emotions are experienced in the gut has a long historical legacy, and many nineteenth-century doctors considered the origins of mental illness to derive from the intestines.\n\nThe phrase \"gut feeling\" may also be used as a shorthand term for an individual's \"common sense\" perception of what is considered \"the right thing to do\", such as helping an injured passerby, avoiding dark alleys and generally acting in accordance with instinctive feelings about a given situation. It can also refer to simple common knowledge phrases which are true no matter when said, such as \"Water is wet\" or \"Fire is hot\", or to ideas that an individual intuitively regards as true (see \"truthiness\" for examples).\n\nHeart\n\nThe heart has a collection of ganglia that is called the \"intrinsic cardiac nervous system\".\n\nHomeostasis\n\nPerception\n\nFeelings of certainty \n\nThe way that we see other people express their emotions or feelings determines how we respond. The way an individual responds to a situation is based on feeling rules. If an individual is uninformed about a situation the way they respond would be in a completely different demeanor than if they were informed about a situation. For example, if a tragic event had occurred and they had knowledge of it, their response would be sympathetic to that situation. If they had no knowledge of the situation, then their response may be indifference. A lack of knowledge or information about an event can shape the way an individual sees things and the way they respond.\n\nTimothy D. Wilson, a psychology professor, tested this theory of the feeling of uncertainty along with his colleague Yoav Bar-Anan, a social psychologist. Wilson and Bar-Ann found that the more uncertain or unclear an individual is about a situation, the more invested they are. Since an individual does not know the background or the ending of a story they are constantly replaying an event in their mind which is causing them to have mixed feelings of happiness, sadness, excitement, and et cetera. If there is any difference between feelings and emotions, the feeling of uncertainty is less sure than the emotion of ambivalence: the former is precarious, the latter is not yet acted upon or decided upon.\n\nThe neurologist Robert Burton, writes in his book On Being Certain, that feelings of certainty may stem from involuntary mental sensations, much like emotions or perceptual recognition (another example might be the tip of the tongue phenomenon).\n\nIndividuals in society want to know every detail about something in hopes to maximize the feeling for that moment, but Wilson found that feeling uncertain can lead to something being more enjoyable because it has a sense of mystery. In fact, the feeling of not knowing can lead them to constantly think and feel about what could have been.\n\nSense of agency & sense of ownership\n\nFeelings about feelings \n\nIndividuals in society predict that something will give them a certain desired outcome or feeling. Indulging in what one might have thought would've made them happy or excited might only cause a temporary thrill, or it might result in the opposite of what was expected and wanted. Events and experiences are done and relived to satisfy one's feelings.\n\nDetails and information about the past is used to make decisions, as past experiences of feelings tend to influence current decision-making, how people will feel in the future, and if they want to feel that way again. Gilbert and Wilson conducted a study to show how pleased a person would feel if they purchased flowers for themselves for no specific reason (birthday, anniversary, or promotion etc.) and how long they thought that feeling would last. People who had no experience of purchasing flowers for themselves and those who had experienced buying flowers for themselves were tested. Results showed that those who had purchased flowers in the past for themselves felt happier and that feeling lasted longer for them than for a person who had never experienced purchasing flowers for themselves.\n\nArlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist, depicted two accounts of emotion. The organismic emotion is the outburst of emotions and feelings. In organismic emotion, emotions/feelings are instantly expressed. Social and other factors do not influence how the emotion is perceived, so these factors have no control on how or if the emotion is suppressed or expressed.\n\nIn interactive emotion, emotions and feelings are controlled. The individual is constantly considering how to react or what to suppress. In interactive emotion, unlike in organismic emotion, the individual is aware of their decision on how they feel and how they show it.\n\nErving Goffman, a sociologist and writer, compared how actors withheld their emotions to the everyday individual. Like actors, individuals can control how emotions are expressed, but they cannot control their inner emotions or feelings. Inner feelings can only be suppressed in order to achieve the expression one wants people to see on the outside. Goffman explains that emotions and emotional experience are an ongoing thing that an individual is consciously and actively working through. Individuals want to conform to society with their inner and outer feelings.\n\nAnger, happiness, joy, stress, and excitement are some of the feelings that can be experienced in life. In response to these emotions, our bodies react as well. For example, nervousness can lead to the sensation of having \"knots in the stomach\" or \"butterflies in the stomach\".\n\nSelf-harm \n\nFeelings can lead to harm. When an individual is dealing with an overwhelming amount of stress and problems in their lives, it can lead to self-harm. When one is in a good state of feeling, they never want it to end; conversely, when someone is in a bad state, they want that feeling to disappear. Inflicting harm or pain to oneself is sometimes the answer for many individuals because they want something to keep their mind off the real problem. These individuals cut, stab, and starve themselves in an effort to feel something other than what they currently feel, as they believe the pain to be not as bad as their actual problem. Distraction is not the only reason why many individuals choose to inflict self-harm. Some people inflict self-harm to punish themselves for feeling a certain way.\n\nSee also \n\n Affect\n Alexithymia\n Consciousness\n Cognitive neuroscience\n Emotion in animals\n Hard problem of consciousness\n Intuition\n Mood\n Myers-Briggs Type Indicator\n Needs\n Pain\n Psychological Types\n Qualia\n Sensation (psychology)\n Vedanā, the Buddhist concept of feeling\n\nFootnotes\n\nExternal links\n \n\n \nQualia"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
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What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?
| 4 |
What else can you tell me about Queen's comments about Bohemian Rhapsody other than rejecting the song?
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Bohemian Rhapsody
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I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety.
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
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[
"\"Tell Me What You Want\" is the fourth single by English R&B band Loose Ends from their first studio album, A Little Spice, and was released in February 1984 by Virgin Records. The single reached number 74 in the UK Singles Chart.\n\nTrack listing\n7” Single: VS658\n \"Tell Me What You Want) 3.35\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Dub Mix)\" 3.34\n\n12” Single: VS658-12\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Extended Version)\" 6.11\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Extended Dub Mix)\" 5.41\n\nU.S. only release - 12” Single: MCA23596 (released 1985)\n \"Tell Me What You Want (U.S. Extended Remix)\" 6.08 *\n \"Tell Me What You Want (U.S. Dub Version)\" 5.18\n\n* The U.S. Extended Remix version was released on CD on the U.S. Version of the 'A Little Spice' album (MCAD27141).\n\nThe Extended Version also featured on Side D of the limited gatefold sleeve version of 'Magic Touch'\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Tell Me What You Want at Discogs.\n\n1984 singles\nLoose Ends (band) songs\nSong recordings produced by Nick Martinelli\nSongs written by Carl McIntosh (musician)\nSongs written by Steve Nichol\n1984 songs\nVirgin Records singles",
"\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" is a song by American singer-songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins, which was released in 1994 as the second single from her second studio album Whaler. The song was written by Hawkins and produced by Stephen Lipson. \"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" peaked at No. 36 on the UK Singles Chart and remained in the Top 100 for five weeks.\n\nCritical reception\nOn its release, Music & Media noted: \"Like the wind blows the leaves off the trees, Hawkins constantly pulls pop songs out of her bag.\" In a review of Whaler, Jim Farber of The Daily News wrote: \"Tracks like 'Right Beside You' and 'Don't Don't Tell Me No' chirp happily along with coquettish flair and great hook appeal.\" Dave Younk of St. Cloud Times described the song as \"excellent\" with \"the most incredible a cappella ending that seems to pleasantly go on forever\".\n\nTrack listing\nCD single\n\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" (Album Version) - 4:52\n\"Right Beside You\" (The Grid 7\" Mix) - 3:38\n\"Right Beside You\" (The Grid Dub Mix) - 8:40\n\"Big Beautiful Bottom in My Face\" - 2:55\n\nCD and cassette single\n\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" (Album Version) - 4:52\n\"Swing from Limb to Limb (My Home Is Your Jungle)\" (Album Version) - 4:15\n\nCD single (UK CD #2)\n\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" (Album Version) - 4:52\n\"I Need Nothing Else\" (Album Version) - 4:15\n\"Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover\" (Album Version) - 5:24\n\"Right Beside You\" (The Grid 12\" Mix) - 8:35\n\nCD single (European promo)\n\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" - 4:52\n\n12\" single (UK release)\n\"Don't Don't Tell Me No\" (Album Version) - 4:52\n\"Swing from Limb to Limb (My Home Is Your Jungle)\" - 4:15\n\"Right Beside You\" (The Grid 12\" Mix) - 8:35\n\"Right Beside You\" (The Grid 7\" Mix) - 3:38\n\nPersonnel\nDon't Don't Tell Me No\n Sophie B. Hawkins - vocals, keyboards, programming\n Stephen Lipson - bass, programming\n Peter Vettese - keyboards\n Neil Conti - drum set\n\nProduction\n Stephen Lipson - producer on \"Don't Don't Tell Me No\", \"Right Beside You\", \"Swing from Limb to Limb\" and \"I Need Nothing Else\"\n Heff Moraes - engineer on \"Don't Don't Tell Me No\", \"Right Beside You\", \"Swing from Limb to Limb\" and \"I Need Nothing Else\"\n Sophie B. Hawkins - producer, recording and mixing on \"Big Beautiful Bottom in My Face\"\n Rick Chertoff, Ralph Schuckett - producers of \"Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover\"\n Steve Churchyard, David Leonard - mixing on \"Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover\"\n The Grid - remixes of \"Right Beside You\"\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\n1994 songs\n1994 singles\nSophie B. Hawkins songs\nColumbia Records singles\nSongs written by Sophie B. Hawkins\nSong recordings produced by Stephen Lipson"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?",
"There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 5 |
Are there any other interesting aspects about Bohemian Rhapsody besides wanting to keep the entire song?
|
Bohemian Rhapsody
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I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out.
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"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
| 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"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?",
"There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
|
What else was said about it?
| 6 |
What else was said about Bohemian Rhapsody besides people fading the song out?
|
Bohemian Rhapsody
|
I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America,
|
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
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[
"Oil and Vinegar is a screenplay that was written but never filmed. It is a screenplay that John Hughes wrote and that Howard Deutch planned to direct. It would have starred Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick.\n\nPlot\nA soon-to-be-married man and a hitchhiking girl end up talking about their lives during the length of the car ride.\n\nProduction\n\nCasting\nThe film was set to have Molly Ringwald and Matthew Broderick as the two main characters.\n\nDevelopment\nThe screenplay was written by Hughes, with Howard Deutch set to direct. Its style was said to be similar to The Breakfast Club (1985) but instead of taking place in detention, it would have taken place in a car with Ringwald's and Broderick's characters both discussing their lives to each other.\n\nFuture\nWhen asked about Oil and Vinegar Howard Deutch said,\n\nYes. That was John's favorite script and he was saving it for himself, and I convinced him to let me do it. It was the story of a traveling salesman that Matthew Broderick was going to play, and a rock-and-roll girl, a real rocker. Polar opposites. Molly [Ringwald] was going to play that. And I had to make a personal decision about whether to go forward or not. We had rehearsals in a couple weeks, and I was exhausted, and my girlfriend Lea Thompson, who became my wife, said, \"You're going to die. You can't do this. I'm not going to stick around and watch that.\" And I think it was also sprinkled with the fact that I wanted to do one movie that was my movie, not necessarily in service to John, even though I loved John. So between the two things, I didn't... It could still happen. I would do it. Not with Matthew and Molly anymore, but the script is still there. It doesn't need anything. It's one of his great scripts. He had so many great scripts. For instance, he would stay up all night, music blasting, and at like 5:30 or 6 a.m., he'd hand me what was supposed to be a rewrite on Some Kind of Wonderful. We needed five pages, and it was 50 pages. I said, \"What did you do?! What is this?\" and he said, \"Oh, I didn't do that. I did something else. Tell me what you think?\" And it was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He wrote the first half of the movie in, like, eight hours, and then finished it a couple days later. That was John. I never knew a writer who could do that. No one else had that ability. Even the stuff I fished out of the garbage was gold.\n\nReferences\n\nUnproduced screenplays\nFilms with screenplays by John Hughes (filmmaker)",
"The 2011 Chişinău explosion was a car explosion in the center of Chişinău, the capital of Moldova. The explosion killed the Moldovan tennis federation chief, Igor Turcan. He was heading the campaign for an independent candidate in last weekend's mayoral election.\n\nTurcan was passing by a model Lada automobile, which had Russian number plates, when it blew up. Turcan was sent to hospital and later died of serious injuries. The police said no one else was killed or injured in the explosion. An earlier eyewitness report had said three people were killed.\n\nTurcan's deputy described the explosion as an \"assassination\" but the Prime Minister of Moldova, Vlad Filat, said it was too early to draw conclusions about what happened.\n\nReferences \n\nMurder in 2011\nCar and truck bombings in Europe\n2011 in Moldova\nAssassinations\nExplosions in Moldova\n21st century in Chișinău\nJune 2011 events in Europe"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?",
"There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out.",
"What else was said about it?",
"And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America,"
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
|
How was it received in America?
| 7 |
How was the song Bohemian Rhapsody received in America?
|
Bohemian Rhapsody
|
I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
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we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter.
|
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
| false |
[
"Hong-Fu Chu (or Hong-Fu Zhu) (13 January 1910 – 24 January 2002) was a Chinese entomologist known for his pioneering work in establishing entomology in China. He was a specialist on insect immatures and was among the pioneers in the use of chaetotaxy in the classification of lepidopteran larvae.\n\nChu was born in 1910 in Nantong, Jiangsu province where he went to school. He received a BS degree from Tsinghua University in 1935 and took an interest in zoology and entomology. He went to the University of Illinois in 1941 to study entomology under W.P. Hayes and V.E. Shelford. He received a MS in 1942 and a PhD in 1945. Chu's book How to the Know the Immature Insect (1949) was a well-known entomology text for many years in the United States of America. After working for a year in the Illinois Natural History Survey on the taxonomy of sawflies with H.H. Ross, and a year at the Wesleyan University, he returned to China. In 1950 he was invited by the Chinese Academy of Science to establish an institute of entomology in Beijing. He invited other entomologists like Chongle Liu, Banghua Cai, Jinren Lu, Junde Qin, and Shijun Ma to work at the institute. He began to organize the publishing of Fauna Sinica and a series on the economic insects of China. He helped train students in phylogenetic systematics and wrote a textbook on animal systematics.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nHow to know the immature insects (1949)\n\n1910 births\n2002 deaths\nChinese entomologists\nUniversity of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign alumni\n20th-century Chinese zoologists",
"Total Loss is the second studio album by American musician How to Dress Well. It was released in September 2012 on Acephale Records in North America and Weird World Records in other regions. The track \"Cold Nites\", which was co-written and co-produced by Forest Swords, was released as a single.\n\nCritical reception\n\nAt Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 77% based on 25 reviews, indicating \"generally favorable reviews\".\n\nIt was listed 33rd on Stereogums list of top 50 albums of 2012. Pitchfork placed it at number 28 on its list of the top 50 albums of 2012.\n\nAccolades\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n2012 albums\nHow to Dress Well albums\nAlbums produced by Rodaidh McDonald"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?",
"There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out.",
"What else was said about it?",
"And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America,",
"How was it received in America?",
"we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
|
How was the record actually received?
| 8 |
How was the record Bohemian Rhapsody actually received?
|
Bohemian Rhapsody
|
I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
|
luckily it took off anyway.
|
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
| false |
[
"\"Jimmy Recard\" is the first single released by Australian hip hop artist, Drapht, taken from his third album, Brothers Grimm. \"Jimmy Recard\" received airplay on radio stations across Australia. In an interview with Triple J, Drapht explained how he came up with the name.I was thinking of successful names so I jumped on the net and actually googled successful names and came up with James and Recard. So I changed James to Jimmy and used Recard as the last name. I think a name does a lot for a character and where you go in life. And it was a positive track on the record because a lot of my stuff kind of feeds from negative ideas.\n\nThe single reached #1 on the AIR Charts and #10 in Triple J's Hottest 100 for 2008. The single also broke into the top 100 in the ARIA Charts reaching #92.\n\nMusic video\nThe music video was produced by Moving Still Productions.\n\nCharts\n\nCertifications\n\nReferences\n\n2008 songs\n2008 debut singles\nDrapht songs\nObese Records singles",
"AfterHours is the second studio album by American R&B singer Mack Wilds. It was released on April 7, 2017, by The Ninety Five Percent and EMPIRE. The album features guest appearances from Wale, Tink and Cam Wallace.\n\nBackground\n\nThe album's title was inspired by the recording process. Mack created AfterHours at night and wanted to reflect this in the content. Wilds “A lot of these songs, when I had a chance to actually record — they were recorded at night,\" Mack said \"while I was shooting 'The Breaks' and 'Shots Fired', that was the only time I had to myself or to even get into the studio. I drew on inspiration that came from looking around and seeing how things change at night time, how things feel at night time. Text messages at 2 a.m. look different than text messages at 2 p.m. Break-ups feel different at night.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nReferences\n\nContemporary R&B albums by American artists\n2017 albums\nEmpire Distribution albums"
] |
[
"Bohemian Rhapsody",
"Queen comments on the record",
"How did some of the members feel about the record?",
"it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it,",
"Who almost rejected it?",
"I don't know.",
"What were some of the other members feelings about it?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me about Queen comments on the record?",
"There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out.",
"What else was said about it?",
"And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America,",
"How was it received in America?",
"we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter.",
"How was the record actually received?",
"luckily it took off anyway."
] |
C_faeaad4ed70043478003d152ca2bbf98_0
|
Did they do any interviews?
| 9 |
Did Queen do any interviews about Bohemian Rhapsody?
|
Bohemian Rhapsody
|
I'm going to shatter some illusions, it was just one of those pieces I wrote for the album: just writing my batch of songs. In its early stages I almost rejected it, but then it grew. We started deciding on a single about halfway through. There were a few contenders - we were thinking of "The Prophet's Song" at one point - but then "Bohemian Rhapsody" seemed the one. There was a time when the others wanted to chop it around a bit, but I refused. If it was going to be released, it would be in its entirety. We knew it was very risky, but we had so much confidence in that song - I did anyway. I felt, underneath it all, that if it was successful it would earn a lot of respect. People were all going, You're joking, they'll never play it, you'll only hear the first few bars and then they'll fade it out. We had numerous rows. EMI were shocked - a six-minute single? You must be joking! The same in America - oh, you just got away with it in Britain. When we finished the album, the Night at the Opera album, that was the track on it that we thought we were gonna release as a single in the UK first. And when we released it in Britain we didn't necessarily think it'd be released in America, cause we know even over here, you know, the AM tastes are even more [hesitates] stricter. Anyway we did have thoughts about even in the UK, perhaps editing it down at all, but we listened to it over and over again and there was no way we could edit it. We tried a few ideas, but if you edited it, you always lost some part of the song, so we had to leave it all in. And luckily it took off anyway. The vocal harmonies was something we wanted to do from the beginning, as we are always keen to do that kind of thing. We wanted to be a group that could do the heaviness of hard rock, but also have harmonies swooping around all over the place. We thought there was some real power and emotion in that combination. The guitar solo was pretty much off the cuff, except I think I had plenty of time to think about that one. I remember playing along with it in the studio for a while when other things were being done. I knew what kind of melody I wanted to play. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
"Bohemian Rhapsody" is a song by the British rock band Queen. It was written by Freddie Mercury for the band's 1975 album A Night at the Opera. The song is a six-minute suite, notable for its lack of a refraining chorus and consisting of several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, an operatic passage, a hard rock part and a reflective coda. "Bohemian Rhapsody" is one of the few songs to emerge from the 1970s progressive rock movement to achieve widespread commercial success and appeal to a mainstream audience.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" topped the UK Singles Chart for nine weeks and had sold more than a million copies by the end of January 1976. In 1991, after Mercury's death, it topped the charts for another five weeks, eventually becoming the UK's third best-selling single of all time. It is also the only song to reach the UK Christmas number one twice by the same artist. It also topped the charts in countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and the Netherlands, and sold over six million copies worldwide. In the United States, the song peaked at number nine in 1976, but reached a new peak of number two on the Billboard Hot 100 after being used in the film Wayne's World (1992). In 2018, the release of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody brought the song renewed popularity and chart success worldwide. In March 2021 it was certified Diamond in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units.
Although critical reaction was initially mixed, "Bohemian Rhapsody" has since become Queen's most popular song and is considered one of the greatest rock songs of all time. The single was accompanied by a groundbreaking promotional video. Rolling Stone stated that its influence "cannot be overstated, practically inventing the music video seven years before MTV went on the air." The Guardian named its music video one of the 50 key events in rock music history, helping make videos a critical tool in music marketing.
In 2004, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. It has appeared in numerous polls of the greatest songs in popular music, including a ranking at number 17 on Rolling Stones list of "the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Mercury's vocal performance was chosen as the greatest in rock history by readers of Rolling Stone. In December 2018, it became the most streamed song from the 20th century, and it had been downloaded or streamed over 1.6 billion times.
History and recording
According to Mercury's friend Chris Smith (a keyboard player in Smile), Mercury first started developing "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the late 1960s; Mercury used to play parts of songs he was writing at the time on the piano, and one of his pieces, known simply as "The Cowboy Song", contained lyrics that ended up in the completed version produced years later, in 1975, specifically, "Mama ... just killed a man." Producer Roy Thomas Baker, who began working with Queen in 1972, related how Mercury once played the opening ballad section on the piano for him in Mercury's flat:
He played the beginning on the piano, then stopped and said, "And this is where the opera section comes in!" Then we went out to eat dinner.
Guitarist Brian May said the band thought that Mercury's blueprint for the song was "intriguing and original, and worthy of work". According to May, much of Queen's material was written in the studio, but this song "was all in Freddie's mind" before they started. In an interview during the band's Australian tour early in 1985, Mercury explained, "It was basically three songs that I wanted to put out, and I just put the three together."
Queen spent a month rehearsing at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey in mid-1975, and drummer Roger Taylor recalled that "Bohemian Rhapsody" was one of the songs the band worked on while they were there. Recording began on 24 August 1975 at Rockfield Studio 1 near Monmouth, South Wales, after a three-week rehearsal at Penrhos Court, near Kington, Herefordshire. During the making of the track, four additional studios – Roundhouse, Sarm Studios, Scorpio Sound, and Wessex Sound Studios – were used. According to some band members, Mercury mentally prepared the song beforehand and directed the band throughout.
Mercury used a C. Bechstein concert grand piano, which he played in the promotional video and the UK tour. Due to the elaborate nature of the song, it was recorded in various sections. The piano was allegedly the same one Paul McCartney had used to record the Beatles' song "Hey Jude", as well as the same one Rick Wakeman used on David Bowie's 1971 album Hunky Dory.
Baker recalled in 1999
May, Mercury, and Taylor reportedly sang their vocal parts continually for 10 to 12 hours a day. The entire piece took three weeks to record, and in some sections featured 180 separate overdubs. Since the studios of the time only offered 24 track analogue tape, it was necessary for the three to overdub themselves many times and "bounce" these down to successive sub-mixes. In the end, eighth-generation tapes were used. The various sections of tape containing the desired sub-mixes had to be spliced (cut and assembled in the correct sequence). May recalled placing a tape in front of the light and being able to see through it, as the tape had been used so many times.
A similar story was told in 1977 by Taylor regarding the elaborate overdubs and sub-mixes for "The March of The Black Queen" for the album Queen II. At that time, the band was using 16 track equipment.
Producer Baker recalls that May's solo was done on only one track, rather than recording multiple tracks. May stated that he wanted to compose "a little tune that would be a counterpart to the main melody; I didn't just want to play the melody". The guitarist said that his better material stems from this way of working, in which he thought of the tune before playing it: "The fingers tend to be predictable unless being led by the brain." According to Baker,
... the end of the song was much heavier because it was one of the first mixes to be done with automation ... If you really listen to it, the ballad starts off clean, and as the opera section gets louder and louder, the vocals get more and more distorted. You can still hear this on the CD. They are clearly distorted.
Composition and analysis
"Bohemian Rhapsody" has been affiliated to the genres of progressive rock (sometimes called symphonic rock), hard rock, and progressive pop. The song is highly unusual for a popular single in featuring no chorus, combining disparate musical styles, and containing lyrics which eschew conventional love-based narratives, and instead make allusions to murder and nihilism. The Beach Boys' 1966 single "Good Vibrations", which also consisted of disparate music sections recorded separately, was a precursor to "Bohemian Rhapsody".
Music scholar Sheila Whiteley suggests that "the title draws strongly on contemporary rock ideology, the individualism of the bohemian artists' world, with rhapsody affirming the romantic ideals of art rock". Commenting on bohemianism, Judith Peraino said,
Mercury intended ... [this song] to be a 'mock opera', something outside the norm of rock songs, and it does follow a certain operatic logic: Choruses of multi-tracked voices alternate with aria-like solos, the emotions are excessive, the plot confusing.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" begins with an introduction, then goes into a piano ballad, before a guitar solo leads to an operatic interlude. A hard rock part follows this and it concludes with a coda. The song is in the keys of B major, E major, A major and F major, and is predominantly in meter. This musical format of writing a song as a suite with changes in style, tone, and tempo throughout was uncommon in most mainstream pop and rock music, but common in progressive rock, a genre which had reached its artistic and commercial zenith between 1970 and 1975 in the music of British bands such as Jethro Tull, Yes, Genesis, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Gentle Giant, Van der Graaf Generator, and Curved Air. The music of progressive rock was characterised by dramatic contrasts, frequent shifts in tempo and in rhythmic character from one section of a composition to the next. Bands from the genre blended rock with classical music, including its structural features, compositional practices, and instrumentation. Queen had embraced progressive rock as one of their many diverse influences.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" parodies many different elements of opera by using bombastic choruses, sarcastic recitative, and distorted Italian operatic phrases. An embryonic version of this style had already been used in Mercury's earlier compositions for the band "My Fairy King" (1973) and "The March of the Black Queen" (1974).
Intro (0:00–0:49)
The song begins with a close five-part harmony a cappella introduction in B major—as evidenced by the presence of a V–I cadence (F7–B) multi-track recordings of Mercury although the video has all four members lip-syncing this part. The lyrics question whether life is "real" or "just fantasy caught in a landslide" before concluding that there can be "no escape from reality".
After 20 seconds, the grand piano enters, the song modulates briefly to E major via another perfect cadence (B7–E) and Mercury's voice alternates with the other vocal parts. The narrator introduces himself as "just a poor boy" but declares that he "needs no sympathy" because he is "easy come, easy go" and then "little high, little low" (when heard in stereo, the words "little high" come from the left speaker and "little low" comes from the right, the other respective speaker plays the piano at the same time); chromatic side-slipping on "easy come, easy go" highlights the dream-like atmosphere. The end of this section is marked by the bass entrance and the cross-handed piano vamp in B.
Ballad (0:49–2:37)
The piano begins in B major along with the entrance of John Deacon's bass guitar, marking the onset of this section. After it plays twice, Mercury's vocals enter. Throughout the section, the vocals evolve from a softly sung harmony to an impassioned solo performance by Mercury. The narrator explains to his mother that he has "just killed a man", with "a gun against his head" and in doing so, has thrown his life away. This "confessional" section, Whiteley comments, is "affirmative of the nurturant and life-giving force of the feminine and the need for absolution". In the middle of the verse (1:19), Taylor's drums enter, and a descending chromatic run leads to a temporary modulation to E major (up one fourth). The narrator makes the second of several invocations to his "mama" in the new key, continuing the original theme. The narrator explains his regret over "mak[ing] you cry" and urging "mama" to "carry on as if nothing really matters". A brief, descending variation of the piano phrase connects to the second verse.
Then the piano intro plays, marking the start of the second verse. As the ballad proceeds into its second verse, the speaker confesses how ashamed he is by his act of murder (as May enters on guitar and mimics the upper range of the piano at 1:50). May imitates a bell tree during the line "sends shivers down my spine", by playing the strings of his guitar on the other side of the bridge. The narrator bids the world goodbye announcing he has "got to go" and prepares to "face the truth" admitting "I don't want to die / I sometimes wish I'd never been born at all". This is where the guitar solo enters.
Guitar solo (2:37–3:05)
Towards the end of the ballad section, the band builds in intensity, incorporating a guitar solo (in E major) played and composed by Brian May. The intensity continues to build, but once the bass line completes its descent establishing modulation to the new key (A major), the entire band cuts out abruptly at 3:03 except for quiet, staccato A major quaver (eighth-note) chords on the piano, marking the start of the "Opera" section.
Opera (3:05–4:07)
A rapid series of rhythmic and harmonic changes introduces a pseudo-operatic midsection, which contains the bulk of the elaborate vocal multi-tracking, depicting the narrator's descent into hell. While the underlying pulse of the song is maintained, the dynamics vary greatly from bar to bar, from only Mercury's voice accompanied by a piano to a multi-voice choir supported by drums, bass, piano, and timpani. The choir effect was created by having May, Mercury, and Taylor repeatedly sing their vocal parts, resulting in 180 separate overdubs. These overdubs were then combined into successive submixes. According to Roger Taylor, the voices of May, Mercury, and himself combined created a wide vocal range: "Brian could get down quite low, Freddie had a powerful voice through the middle, and I was good at the high stuff." The band wanted to create "a wall of sound, that starts down and goes all the way up". The band used the bell effect for lyrics "Magnifico" and "let me go". Also, on "let him go", Taylor singing the top section carries his note on further after the rest of the "choir" have stopped singing.
Lyrical references in this passage include Scaramouche, the fandango, Galileo Galilei, Figaro, and Beelzebub, with cries of "Bismillah! [Arabic: "In the name of God!"] we will not let you go!", as rival factions fight over his soul, some wishing to "let [him] go" and "spare him his life from this monstrosity", with others sending him "thunderbolts and lightning – very, very frightening [to him]". In Freddie Mercury: The definitive biography, Lesley-Ann Jones theorises that it is also a figurative representation of the four members: Mercury, May, Taylor, and Deacon respectively. The section concludes with a full choral treatment of the lyric "Beelzebub has a devil put aside for me!", on a block B major chord. Roger Taylor tops the final chord with a falsetto B in the fifth octave (B5).
Using the 24 track technology available at the time, the "opera" section took about three weeks to finish. Producer Roy Thomas Baker said, "Every time Freddie came up with another Galileo, I would add another piece of tape to the reel." Baker recalls that they kept wearing out the tape, which meant having to do transfers.
Hard rock (4:07–4:54)
The operatic section leads into a rock interlude with a guitar riff written by Mercury. At 4:15, a quadruple-tracked Mercury (in stereo, the four parts are panned two on the left and two on the right) sings angry lyrics addressed to an unspecified "you", accusing them of betrayal and abuse and insisting "can't do this to me, baby", before the final lines conclude that the singer "just gotta get right outta" an unspecified "here". Three ascending guitar runs follow. Mercury then plays a similar B run on the piano, as the song builds up to the finale with a ritardando.
Outro (4:54–5:55)
After Mercury plays ascending octaves of notes from the B mixolydian mode (composed of the notes from the E scale), the song then returns to the tempo and form of the introduction, initially in E major, before quickly modulating to C minor, only to soon go through an abrupt short series of modulations, bringing it back to C minor again in time for the final "nothing really matters" section. A guitar accompanies the chorus "ooh, ooh yeah, ooh yeah". A double-tracked twin guitar melody is played through an amplifier designed by John Deacon, affectionately nicknamed the "Deacy Amp". Mercury's line "Nothing really matters ..." appears again, "cradled by light piano arpeggios suggesting both resignation (minor tonalities) and a new sense of freedom in the wide vocal span". After the line "nothing really matters" is repeated multiple times, the song finally concludes in the key of E major, but then changes again to F major just before it ends. The final line, "Any way the wind blows", is followed by the quiet sound of a large tam-tam that finally expels the tension built up throughout the song.
Lyrics
The New York Times commented that "the song's most distinct feature is the fatalistic lyrics". Mercury refused to explain his composition other than to say it was about relationships; the band is still protective of the song's secret. Brian May supports suggestions that the song contained veiled references to Mercury's personal traumas. He recalls "Freddie was a very complex person: flippant and funny on the surface, but he concealed insecurities and problems in squaring up his life with his childhood. He never explained the lyrics, but I think he put a lot of himself into that song." May, though, says the band had agreed that the core of a lyric was a private issue for the composer. In a BBC Three documentary about the making of "Bohemian Rhapsody", Roger Taylor maintains that the true meaning of the song is "fairly self-explanatory with just a bit of nonsense in the middle".
Despite this, critics, both journalistic and academic, have speculated over the meaning behind the song's lyrics. Some believe the lyrics describe a suicidal murderer haunted by demons or depict events just preceding an execution. The latter explanation points to Albert Camus's novel The Stranger, in which a young man confesses to an impulsive murder and has an epiphany before he is executed, as probable inspiration. When the band released a Greatest Hits cassette in Iran, a leaflet in Persian was included with translation and explanations. In the explanation, Queen states that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil. On the night before his execution, he calls for God saying, "Bismillah" ("In the name of God" in Arabic), and with the help of angels, regains his soul from Shaitan (the devil in Arabic).
Other critics interpreted the lyrics as Mercury's way of dealing with personal issues. Music scholar Sheila Whiteley observes that Mercury reached a turning point in his personal life in the year he wrote "Bohemian Rhapsody". He had been living with Mary Austin for seven years but had just embarked on his first love affair with a man. She suggests that the song provides an insight into Mercury's emotional state at the time, "living with Mary ('Mamma', as in Mother Mary) and wanting to break away ('Mamma mia let me go')". Others suggest it as a veiled reference to coming out, and dealing with the repercussions of the sodomy laws of the time.
Still others believe the lyrics were only written to fit with the music, and had no intended meaning; the D.J., television entertainer, and comedian Kenny Everett, who played an influential role in popularising the single on his radio show on Capital Radio, quoted Mercury as claiming the lyrics were simply "random rhyming nonsense".
Release
When the band wanted to release the single in 1975, various executives suggested to them, that at 5 minutes and 55 seconds it was too long, and would never be a hit. The song was played to other musicians who commented the band had no hope of it ever being played on radio. According to producer Roy Thomas Baker, he and the band bypassed this corporate assessment by playing the song for Capital Radio D.J. Kenny Everett:
"we had a reel-to-reel copy but we told him he could only have it if he promised not to play it. 'I won't play it,' he said, winking ..."
The plan worked — Everett teased his listeners by playing only parts of the song. Audience demand intensified when Everett played the full song on his show 14 times in 2 days. Hordes of fans attempted to buy the single the following Monday, only to be told by record stores that it had not yet been released. The same weekend, Paul Drew, who ran the RKO General stations in the U.S, heard the track on Everett's show in London. Drew managed to get a copy of the tape and started to play it in the U.S, which forced the hand of Queen's US label, Elektra. In an interview with Sound on Sound, Baker reflects that "it was a strange situation where radio on both sides of the Atlantic was breaking a record that the record companies said would never get airplay!"
Eventually the unedited single was released, with "I'm in Love with My Car" as the B-side. Following Everett's escapade in October 1975, Eric Hall, a record plugger, gave a copy to David "Diddy" Hamilton to play on his weekday Radio One show. Hall stated "Monster, Monster! This could be a hit!"
The song became the 1975 UK Christmas number one, holding the top position for nine weeks. "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the first song ever to get to number one in the UK twice with the same version, and is also the only single to have been Christmas number one twice with the same version. The second was upon its re-release (as a double A-side single with "These Are the Days of Our Lives") in 1991, following Mercury's death, staying at number 1 for 5 weeks. The re-released version sold 673,000 copies in 1991 in the UK.
In the U.S, the single was also a success, although initially to a lesser extent than in the UK. The single, released in December 1975, reached number 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was certified gold by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of one million copies.
In a retrospective article, Anthony DeCurtis of Rolling Stone explained why the song performed less strongly in the US charts by saying that it is "the quintessential example of the kind of thing that doesn't exactly go over well in America". Its chart run of 24 weeks, however, placed it at number 18 on Billboards year-end chart, higher than some number 1s of the year. With the Canadian record-buying public, the single fared better, reaching number one in the RPM national singles chart for the week ending 1 May 1976.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was re-released as a double A-side cassette single with "The Show Must Go On" in January 1992, following the death of Freddie Mercury, with proceeds going to the Magic Johnson Foundation for AIDS research. The song re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 chart after 16 years, reaching number 2, and spending 17 weeks on the chart. After the release of the Queen biopic named after the song, it re-entered the charts for a third time at number 33, marking 26 years since it last charted.
In March 2021 it was certified Diamond (10× platinum) in the US for combined digital sales and streams equal to 10 million units. It had sold 4.4 million digital copies in the US .
Promotional video
Though some artists had made video clips to accompany songs (including Queen themselves; for example, their earlier singles "Keep Yourself Alive", "Liar", "Seven Seas of Rhye" and "Killer Queen" already had "pop promos", as they were known at the time), it was only after the success of "Bohemian Rhapsody" that it became a regular practice for record companies to produce promotional videos for artists' single releases. The Guardian stated it "ensured videos would henceforth be a mandatory tool in the marketing of music". These videos could then be shown on television shows around the world, such as the BBC's Top of the Pops, without the need for the artist to appear in person. A promo video also allowed the artist to have their music broadcast and accompanied by their own choice of visuals, rather than dancers such as Pan's People. According to May, the video was produced so that the band could avoid miming on Top of the Pops since they would have looked off miming to such a complex song. He also said that the band knew they would be set to appear at Dundee's Caird Hall on tour, a date which clashed with the programme, thus a promo would solve the issue. The video has been hailed as launching the MTV age.
The band used Trillion, a subsidiary of Trident Studios, their former management company and recording studio. They hired one of their trucks and got it to Elstree Studios, where the band was rehearsing for their tour. The video was directed by Bruce Gowers, who had directed a video of the band's 1974 performance at the Rainbow Theatre in London, and was recorded by cameraman Barry Dodd and assistant director/floor manager Jim McCutcheon. The video was recorded in just four hours on 10 November 1975, at a cost of £4,500. Gowers reported that the band was involved in the discussion of the video and the result, and "was a co-operative to that extent, but there was only one leader."
The video opens with a shot of the four band members standing in diamond formation with their heads tilted back in near darkness as they sing the a cappella part. The lights fade up, and the shots cross-fade into close-ups of Mercury. The composition of the shot is the same as Mick Rock's cover photograph for their second album Queen II. The photo, inspired by a photograph of actress Marlene Dietrich, was the band's favourite image of themselves. The video then fades into them playing their instruments. In the opera section of the video, the scene reverts to the Queen II standing positions, after which they perform once again on stage during the hard rock segment. In the closing seconds of the video Roger Taylor is depicted stripped to the waist, striking the tam tam in the manner of the trademark of the Rank Organisation's Gongman, familiar in the UK as the opening of all Rank film productions.
All of the special effects were achieved during the recording, rather than editing. The visual effect of Mercury's face cascading away (during the echoed lines "Magnifico" and "Let me go") was accomplished by pointing the camera at a monitor, giving visual feedback, a glare analogous to audio feedback. The honeycomb illusion was created using a shaped lens. The video was edited within five hours because it was due to be broadcast the same week in which it was taped. The video was sent to the BBC as soon as it was completed and aired for the first time on Top of the Pops in November 1975.
Critical reception
Although the song has become one of the most revered in popular music history, the initial critical reaction was mixed. The UK music papers reacted with bemusement, recognising that the song was original and technically accomplished, but they mostly remained indifferent. Pete Erskine of NME observed that, "It'll be interesting to see whether it'll be played in its entirety on the radio. It's performed extremely well, but more in terms of production than anything else... Someone somewhere has decided that the boys' next release must sound 'epic'. And it does. They sound extremely self-important."
Allan Jones of Melody Maker was unimpressed, describing the song as "a superficially impressive pastiche of incongruous musical styles" and that Queen "contrived to approximate the demented fury of the Balham Amateur Operatic Society performing The Pirates of Penzance... 'Bohemian Rhapsody' is full of drama, passion and romance and sounds rather like one of those mini-opera affairs that Pete Townsend [sic] used to tack on to the end of Who albums", before concluding, "The significance of the composition eludes me totally, though I must admit to finding it horrifically fascinating. It's likely to be a hit of enormous proportions despite its length." Ray Fox-Cumming of Record Mirror was also left unmoved, saying, "It has no immediate selling point whatsoever: among its many parts. there's scarcely a shred of a tune and certainly no one line to latch onto. There's no denying that it's devilishly clever, encompassing everything from bits of operatic harmonies to snatches that sound like Sparks and David Cassidy, but, in the end the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts." He did, however, say that it was "unthinkable" that it wouldn't be a hit. The most positive review came from Sounds, which called it "impossibly disjointed and complex, but a dazzlingly clever epic from the fevered mind of Freddie Mercury". Cash Box called it "a softly sung ode to the prospect of moving on from staid ways with "good singing" and "good production."
Legacy
Musical impact
In 1976, when asked for his opinion on "Bohemian Rhapsody", the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson praised the song as "the most competitive thing that's come along in ages" and "a fulfillment and an answer to a teenage prayer—of artistic music". Producer Steve Levine said the track broke "all sonic production barriers" in a fashion similar to the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" (1966), Phil Spector's "Be My Baby" (1963), and 10cc's "I'm Not in Love" (1975). Greg Lake, whose song "I Believe in Father Christmas" was kept from number one in the UK by "Bohemian Rhapsody" when it was released in 1975, acknowledged that he was "beaten by one of the greatest records ever made", describing it as "a once-in-a-lifetime recording".
Addressing the song's enduring popularity, author and music lecturer Jochen Eisentraut wrote in 2012: "A year before punk made it unfashionable, progressive rock had an astounding success with the theoretically over-length (nearly 6-minute) single 'Bohemian Rhapsody' which bore many of the hallmarks of the 'prog' genre". He said it was "unique at this point to hear a hit single in this style", it was "more accessible than other music of the genre" and was "able to communicate beyond the usual confines of the style". Author and progressive rock historian Stephen Lambe called it a "remarkable" single and said it "provides a neat but coincidental bridge between prog in its prime and the move to more aggressive songwriting", suggesting the song "feels like a grotesque (although probably unintentional) parody of progressive rock". The New Rolling Stone Album Guide described it as "either a prog-rock benchmark or the most convoluted novelty song ever recorded". Writing for the BBC in 2015, the Chicago Tribunes music critic Greg Kot called it a "prog-rock pocket operetta" and said the song's "reign as a work of wigged-out genius rather than a dated gimmick testifies to its go-for-broke attitude—one that has resonated across generations".
In 2009, The Guardians music critic, Tom Service, examined the song's relationship with the traditions of classical music, describing its popularity as "one of the strangest musical phenomena out there":
A comparison was also made between the song and Led Zeppelin's 1971 epic "Stairway to Heaven" by music writers Pete Prown and HP Newquist. They observed both songs were "a slow, introspective beginning and gradual climb to a raging metal jam and back again", with the notable distinction being "while Zeppelin meshed folk influences with heavy metal, Queen opted for the light grandeur of the operetta as part of its hard rock". They said "for sheer cleverness alone, not to mention May's riveting electric work, 'Bohemian Rhapsody' rightfully became one of the top singles of 1975 and established Queen in the elite of seventies rock bands".
In 2015, The Economist described it as "one of the most innovative pieces of the progressive rock era". It wrote "though Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and the Beatles' Paul McCartney had experimented with symphonic elements, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Pete Townshend of the Who had created narrative albums with distinct 'movements', none had had the audacity to import a miniature opera into rock music."
Wayne's World
In 1992, the song enjoyed renewed popularity in the United States after being featured in a scene in the film Wayne's World, in which the titular character and his friends headbang in a car to the rock part near the end of the song. The film's director, Penelope Spheeris, was hesitant to use the song, as it did not entirely fit with the lead characters, who were fans of less flamboyant hard rock and heavy metal. Mike Myers insisted that the song fit the scene. According to music scholar Theodore Gracyk, by 1992, when the film was released, even "classic rock" stations had stopped playing the almost six-minute song. Gracyk suggests that beginning the tape in the middle of the song after "the lyrics which provide the song's narrative ... forces the film's audience to respond to its presence in the scene without the 'commentary' of the lyrics". Helped by the song, the soundtrack album of the film was a major hit.
In connection with this, a new video was released, interspersing excerpts from the film with footage from the original Queen video, along with some live footage of the band. Myers was horrified that the record company had mixed clips from Wayne's World with Queen's original video, fearing that this would upset the band. He said, "they've just whizzed on a Picasso." He asked the record company to tell Queen that the video was not his idea and that he apologised to them. The band, though, sent a reply simply saying, "Thank you for using our song." This astonished Myers, who responded, "Thank you for even letting me touch the hem of your garments!"
The Wayne's World video version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" won Queen its only MTV Video Music Award for "Best Video from a Film". When remaining members Brian May and Roger Taylor took the stage to accept the award, Brian May was overcome with emotion and said that "Freddie would be tickled." In the final scene of the video, a pose of the band from the video from the original "Bohemian Rhapsody" clip morphs into an identically posed 1985 photo, first featured in the "One Vision" video.
In the 2018 Queen biopic feature film Bohemian Rhapsody, Myers makes a cameo as a fictional record executive who pans the song and refuses to release it as a single, proclaiming that it is too long for radio and that it is not a song that "teenagers can crank up the volume in their car and bang their heads to", a reference to the iconic scene in Wayne's World.
Achievements and accolades
The song has won numerous awards and has been covered and parodied by many artists. At the 19th Annual Grammy Awards in February 1977, "Bohemian Rhapsody" received two Grammy Award nominations for Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo, Group or Chorus and Best Arrangement for Voices. In October 1977, only two years after its release, the British Phonographic Industry named "Bohemian Rhapsody" as the best British single of the period 1952–77. It is a regular entry in greatest-songs polls, and it was named by the Guinness Book of Records in 2002 as the top British single of all time. The song is also listed in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
In 2004, the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame. , "Bohemian Rhapsody" is the second most-played song on British radio, in clubs and on jukeboxes collectively, after Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale". On 30 September 2007 for BBC Radio 1's 40th birthday, it was revealed on The Radio 1 Chart Show that "Bohemian Rhapsody" had been the most played song since Radio 1's launch.
In December 2018, "Bohemian Rhapsody" officially became the most-streamed song from the 20th century, surpassing Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Guns N' Roses' "Sweet Child o' Mine". "Bohemian Rhapsody" also became the most-streamed classic rock song of all time. The number of downloads of the song and original video exceeded 1.6 billion downloads across global on-demand streaming services. The video surpassed one billion views on YouTube in July 2019, making it the oldest music video to reach one billion on the platform, and the first pre-1990s song to reach that figure.
Polls
In a 2001 poll of more than 50,000 readers of The Observer newspaper and viewers of British TV's Channel 4 for the 100 best number-one singles of all time, the song came second to John Lennon's "Imagine". In a 2002 poll of more than 31,000 people conducted for Guinness World Records' British Hit Singles, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted Britain's favourite single, beating Lennon's "Imagine" to the top spot.
In 2002, it came in 10th in a BBC World Service poll to find the world's favourite song. It has been in the top five of the Dutch annual "Top 100 Aller Tijden" ("All-Time Top 100 [Singles]") since 1977, reaching number one on eight occasions, more than any other artist. In 1999, the annual "Top 2000" poll commenced to find the best songs ever made, and "Bohemian Rhapsody" has been ranked number one in all but five years (2005, 2010, 2014, 2015 and 2020 when it was number two). In a 2012 readers poll conducted by Rolling Stone magazine, "Bohemian Rhapsody" was voted the best vocal performance in rock history. In 2010, the song ranked at 166 on Rolling Stones "500 Greatest Songs of All Time" list, and was re-ranked at number 17 in 2021.
In 2012, the song topped an ITV poll in the UK to find "The Nation's Favourite Number One" over 60 years of music, ahead of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" (number two), Adele's "Someone like You" (number three), Oasis' "Don't Look Back in Anger" (number four) and The Beatles' "Hey Jude" (number five). The song was also ranked number five in RadioMafia's list of "Top 500 Songs".
Cover versions
Over two dozen artists have recorded or performed cover versions of "Bohemian Rhapsody", including charted single releases by:
Bad News – a 1986 spoof version produced by Brian May which reached UK number 44
The Braids – an R&B version recorded for the soundtrack to the 1996 film High School High and which peaked at UK number 21, US number 42, and Canada number 13
Panic! at the Disco – a version recorded for the soundtrack of the 2016 film Suicide Squad and which peaked at UK number 80, US number 64 and Canada number 47
A video cover featuring The Muppets also went viral and was subsequently released as a single in late 2009, peaking at number 32 in the UK.
"Weird Al" Yankovic's 1993 album Alapalooza includes a version of the song entitled "Bohemian Polka", which is a rearrangement of the entire song as a polka.
40th anniversary
To mark the 40th anniversary of "Bohemian Rhapsody", the song was released on a limited edition 12" vinyl with the original B-side "I'm In Love With My Car" on 27 November 2015 for Record Store Day 2015. Queen also released A Night At The Odeon, Live At Hammersmith 75, on CD, DVD-Video and Blu-ray. This includes the first live "professionally" recorded performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody". However, the very first recording and live performance of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was the performance on 14 November 1975 in Liverpool.
Live performances
The a cappella opening was too complex to perform live, so Mercury tried various ways of introducing the song. When "Mustapha" became a live favourite, Mercury would often sub in that song's a cappella opening, which was easier to reproduce live as it was only one voice—this combination features in their 1979 live album Live Killers. During their 1982 Hot Space Tour, and occasionally at other times, Mercury would do a piano improvisation (generally the introduction to "Death on Two Legs") that ended with the first notes of the song. Often, the preceding song would end, and Mercury would sit at the piano, say a quick word, and start playing the ballad section. At Live Aid where "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their opening song, Mercury commenced with the ballad section.
Initially following the song's release, the operatic middle section proved a problem for the band. Because of extensive multi-tracking, it could not be performed on stage. The band did not have enough of a break between the Sheer Heart Attack and A Night at the Opera tours to find a way to make it work live, so they split the song into three sections that were played throughout the night. The opening and closing ballads were played as part of a medley, with "Killer Queen" and "March of the Black Queen" taking the place of the operatic and hard rock sections. In 1976 concerts where the same medley was played, the operatic section from the album would be played from tape as the introduction to the setlist. During this playback, Mercury would appear briefly to sing live for the line, "I see a little sillhouetto of a man". As the song segued into the hard rock section, the band would emerge on the smoke-filled stage—the playback would end at this point, and the hard rock section would be performed live (without the final ballad section, which appeared later in the set).
Starting with the A Day at the Races Tour in 1977, the band adopted their lasting way of playing the song live. The opening ballad would be played on stage, and after May's guitar solo, the lights would go down, the band would leave the stage, and the operatic section would be played from tape, while coloured stage lights provided a light show based around the voices of the opera section. Most playings of the opera section from the tape would often be accompanied by a portion of the song's music video containing the footage used for the operatic portion of the song. Other playings would be played over montages of footage filmed from the band members' other experiences throughout their daily lives. A blast of pyrotechnics after Taylor's high note on the final "for me" would announce the band's return for the hard rock section and closing ballad. Queen played the song in this form all through the Magic Tour of 1986. This style was also used for the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert, with Elton John singing the opening ballad and then after the taped operatic section, Axl Rose singing the hard rock section. John and Rose sang the closing ballad part together in a duet.
"Bohemian Rhapsody" was performed by Queen + Paul Rodgers throughout their tours, accompanied by a video of Mercury. Footage from the Live at Wembley '86 was used for the 2005–06 tour, and the 1981 Montreal performance used for the Rock the Cosmos Tour. As with the Queen tours, the band went backstage for the operatic section, which was accompanied by a video tribute to Freddie Mercury. When the hard rock section began, the lights came back up to the full band on stage, including Rodgers, who took over lead vocals. Rodgers duetted with the recording of Mercury for the "outro" section, allowing the audience to sing the final "Nothing really matters to me", while the taped Mercury took a bow for the crowd. Rodgers would then repeat the line, and the final line ("Any way the wind blows") was delivered with one last shot of Mercury smiling at the audience. Commenting upon this staging, Brian May says that they "had to rise to the challenge of getting Freddie in there in a way which gave him his rightful place, but without demeaning Paul in any way. It also kept us live and 'present', although conscious and proud of our past, as we logically should be."
Since 2012, May and Taylor have toured with former American Idol contestant Adam Lambert under the name Queen + Adam Lambert (following two one-off performances together in 2009 and 2011), with "Bohemian Rhapsody" regularly included at the end of their set.
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Decade-end charts
All-time charts
Sales and certifications
Queen comments on the song
Personnel
Source:
Freddie Mercury – lead and backing vocals, piano, operatic vocals (middle register)
Brian May – electric guitar, operatic vocals (low register)
Roger Taylor – drums, timpani, gong, operatic vocals (high register)
John Deacon – bass guitar
See also
List of Bohemian Rhapsody cover versions
List of best-selling singles in the United Kingdom
List of best-selling singles in the United States
Citations
General references
External links
1975 singles
1975 songs
1976 singles
1991 singles
1992 singles
Brit Award for British Single
British hard rock songs
British progressive rock songs
British rock songs
Christmas number-one singles in the United Kingdom
Dutch Top 40 number-one singles
Elektra Records singles
EMI Records singles
Grammy Hall of Fame Award recipients
Hollywood Records singles
Irish Singles Chart number-one singles
Music based on the Faust legend
Never Shout Never songs
Number-one singles in Australia
Number-one singles in New Zealand
Number-one singles in Spain
Parlophone singles
Progressive pop songs
Queen (band) songs
RPM Top Singles number-one singles
Signature songs
Single Top 100 number-one singles
Song recordings produced by Roy Thomas Baker
Songs about crime
Songs about death
Songs composed in B-flat major
Songs written by Freddie Mercury
Symphonic rock songs
The Flaming Lips songs
The Muppets songs
UK Singles Chart number-one singles
Virgin EMI Records singles
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[
"Shatner's Raw Nerve was an American television program on The Biography Channel. In it, William Shatner sits down with various celebrities and conducts offbeat interviews with them. Some celebrities who have appeared are Tim Allen, Jon Voight, Drew Carey, Kelsey Grammer, Walter Koenig, LeVar Burton, Scott Bakula, Jimmy Kimmel, Rush Limbaugh, Judge Judy Sheindlin, \"Weird Al\" Yankovic, Jenna Jameson, and Leonard Nimoy (one of his last interviews). It is produced by Scott Sternberg Productions.\n\nReactions from Star Trek cast members \nDuring the interview with Walter Koenig, Shatner could tell that Koenig was withholding something about how he viewed Shatner. After Shatner persuaded him to continue, Koenig revealed that there had been a feeling on the set of Star Trek that Shatner could get any of them fired, though he never saw Shatner actually follow through on that perceived feeling. Koenig also informed Shatner that while his and other actors' roles may not have been as prominent as Shatner's, Leonard Nimoy's or DeForest Kelley's, there were still contributions they could have made to each scene if Shatner had allowed them to do so. As Koenig put it, they wanted to say to him, \"Cut the shit, Shatner\", but did not.\n\nSimilar to his experience when conducting interviews for Star Trek Memories, Shatner was surprised by this and was remorseful, saying that he would have behaved differently if he had known. He then offered to find a role for Koenig on his then current series ($#*! My Dad Says) since he had \"a little more authority\" than he did on Star Trek, but the series was cancelled before he could fulfill that offer.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n (September 3, 2011 copy at the Internet Archive)\n (November 3, 2012 copy at the Internet Archive)\n\n2000s American television talk shows\n2010s American television talk shows\n2008 American television series debuts\nEnglish-language television shows\nThe Biography Channel shows\nWilliam Shatner",
"R v Secretary of State for the Home Department, ex parte Simms [1999] UKHL 33 is a UK constitutional law case, concerning parliamentary sovereignty.\n\nFacts\nSimms and another prisoner, both serving life sentences for murder, brought judicial review proceedings against the Home Secretary’s contention that they could not have oral interviews with journalists unless no part would be published. Under the Prison Act 1952 section 47(1) the Home Secretary had passed Prison Service Standing Order 5, paragraph 37-A which restricted oral interviews with journalists. The prisoners contended this impinged upon the right of journalists to free speech under the European Convention on Human Rights article 10, because practically the opportunity for any investigation into their convictions would be inhibited by not allowing them to speak. The prisoners could, however, engage in written correspondence.\n\nLatham J held that the prisoners should be able to do oral interviews. The Court of Appeal held the prisoners could not do oral interviews.\n\nJudgment\nThe House of Lords allowed the appeal. Lord Steyn gave the leading judgment.\n\nLord Hoffmann agreed with Lord Steyn and said the following.\n\nLord Hobhouse gave a concurring opinion. Lord Browne-Wilkinson agreed with Lord Steyn. Lord Millett agreed with Lord Steyn and Lord Hobhouse.\n\nSee also\n\nUnited Kingdom constitutional law\nWatkins v Home Office and others\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nUnited Kingdom constitutional case law\nHouse of Lords cases\n1999 in British law\n2000 in British law\n1999 in case law\n2000 in case law\nUnited Kingdom administrative case law"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)"
] |
C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
|
Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?
| 1 |
Was Tallulah Bankhead in any movies in 1948-1952?
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Tallulah Bankhead
|
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie.
|
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
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[
"Sultana, also known as Sultana Razaaq, was one of the earliest film actresses from India and acted both in silent movies and later in talkie movies. She was a daughter of India’s first female film director, Fatima Begum. Zubeida (leading actress of India's first talkie film Alam Ara (1931)) was her younger sister.\n\nSultana was born in Surat, Gujarat in western India. She had two sisters, Zubeida and Shehzadi, both actresses. Their mother, Fatima Begum, claimed that her three daughters were fathered by Nawab Sidi Ibrahim Muhammad Yakut Khan III of Sachin State. However, there is no record of a marriage or any contract having taken place between the Nawab and Fatima Begum or of the Nawab having recognized any of her children as his own, a prerequisite for legal paternity in Muslim family law.\n\nCareer\nSultana was a popular actress in the silent movie era, usually cast in romantic roles. She started her career as actress in Veer Abhimanyu (1922) film and later performed in several silent films. Later, she also acted in talkie movies. When India was partitioned in 1947, she migrated to Pakistan with her husband, a wealthy man named Seth Razaaq. Her daughter, Jamila Razaaq, also became an actress with her encouragement. She produced a film in Pakistan, named Hum Ek Hain (1961), written by famous scriptwriter, Fayyaz Hashmi. The film was partly shot in colour, which was rare those days, but it failed miserably and Sultana stopped producing any films afterwards.\n\nSultana's daughter, Jamila Razaaq, married the well known Pakistani cricketer Waqar Hasan, who is the brother of filmmaker Iqbal Shehzad. He runs a business under the name National Foods at Karachi.\n\nFilmography\n\nSilent Movies\n\nTalkie Movies\n\nProducer\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Sultana brief biography\n List of films\n \n\nYear of birth missing\nYear of death missing\n20th-century Indian actresses\nActresses in Hindi cinema\nGujarati people\nIndian film actresses\nIndian Muslims\nIndian silent film actresses\nPakistani people of Gujarati descent\nPeople of British India",
"True Movies 2 was a British free-to-air television channel that was owned by Moving Movies Ltd., majority owned by CSC Media Group (formerly Chart Show Channels). It was launched on 20 March 2006 and was a sister channel from True Movies which was launched on 29 April 2005. True Movies 2 initially broadcast for two hours in the early morning, from 4am to 6am by timesharing with Pop, a children's cartoon channel. The service was later extended to 24 hours a day.\n\nTrue Movies 2 was aimed especially at a female audience with its movies dedicated to true life dramas, which are mostly made-for-TV movies.\n\nReception of the channel did not require any special Sky or Freesat equipment nor subscription, any free to air receiver can pick up the channel.\nThe channel was temporarily rebranded from 19 May to 2 June 2014 as True Murder. From 30 September 2016, the channel was replaced by True Movies +1.\n\nEnglish-language television stations in the United Kingdom\nMovie channels in the United Kingdom\nCSC Media Group\nSony Pictures Television\nTelevision channels and stations established in 2006\nTelevision channels and stations disestablished in 2016"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)",
"Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?",
"Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie."
] |
C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
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Was the movie successful?
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Was the movie The Glass Menagerie successful?
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Tallulah Bankhead
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Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
| true |
[
"Sampan, also known as San-Ban, is a 1968 film which was the first feature directed, written and co-produced by Terry Bourke. The film was successful at the box office.\n\nPlot\nIn Hong Kong, the owner of a sampan has two sons, one good and one bad. One son falls in love with his stepmother.\n\nProduction\nThe script was written by Bourke, who was working as a journalist in Hong Kong, He met Gordon Mailloux who agreed to produce.\n\nRelease\nAccording to Mailoux, the film was the most successful movie made in Hong Kong that year. Bourke claimed the movie contained the first naked scene in Chinese cinema. It was banned in Taiwan.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1968 films\nHong Kong films",
"K. S. Ashoka known as Ashoka is an Indian movie director, writer.. He became popular in the wake of the success of his debut movie 6-5=2 Kannada. It was the first found footage movie in Kannada. with the grand success of the movie 6-5=2 Kannda version the same movie was Remade in Hindi with same title 6-5=2 Hindi and released in 2014 by different director. In Telugu, it was dubbed and released as Chitram kadu nizam. following the success of the movie 6-5=2. K S Ashoka directed second Movie name Dia which is critically acclaimed and was commercially successful as well.\n\nEarly life\nWith an Engineering degree from Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE) Mysuru, Ashoka was working In Citibank India where he found his colleague D Krishna Chaitanya as his first Movie 6-5=2 producer. following the success of the movie 6-5=2 they again collaborated to work together for the next movie Dia.\n\nFilmography\n\nAwards and nominations\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n21st-century Indian film directors\nKannada film directors\nFilm directors from Bangalore\nLiving people\nScreenwriters from Bangalore\n1982 births"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)",
"Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?",
"Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie.",
"Was the movie successful?",
"The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics."
] |
C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
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Did she have another role in the movie?
| 3 |
Aside from the role of Amanda, did Tallulah Bankhead have another role in The Glass Menagerie?
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Tallulah Bankhead
|
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part.
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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
| false |
[
"Saranya Mohan (born 19 February 1989) is an former Indian actress, who predominantly appeared in Malayalam and Tamil films. She has also acted in a few Telugu, Kannada and Hindi films. She is best known for her performances in Yaaradi Nee Mohini (2008), Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu (2009), Eeram (2009), Velayudham (2011) and Osthe (2011).\n\nEarly life\n\nSaranya is the eldest daughter of Mohan and Kalamandalam Devi. She has a younger sister named Sukanya who is also trained classical dancer. Both her parents are trained classical dancers and dance teachers, who together run a dance school, Y.K.B Dance Academy in Alappuzha, where Saranya herself also learnt dancing bharatanatyam. She studied at St. Joseph's College for Women, Alappuzha, completing her B. A. degree in English literature. After completing MA in English Literature from Annamalai University, Chidambaram she completed MFA in Bharatanatyam from the same university.\n\nCareer\n\nShe was brought to light by Malayalam director Fazil, who had seen Saranya dancing at her dancing school. After approaching and persuading her parents, he cast her for a child character in the 1997 Malayalam film Aniyathi Pravu and its Tamil remake, Kadhalukku Mariyadhai. Next she made appearance as a child artist in the hit Malayalam movie Harikrishnans with Mammootty, Mohanlal and Juhi Chawla in lead roles. Then she also was seen as a child artist in yet another Malayalam movie Rakthasakshikal Sindabad with Mohanlal and Suresh Gopi. Then she took a break, concentrating on her studies, before enacting a supporting role in another Fazil directorial, Oru Naal Oru Kanavu (2005), in which she acted as a sister to the male lead character.\n\nHer subsequent release, the Dhanush-Nayantara starrer Yaaradi Nee Mohini (2008), brought her into limelight. Her comedic performance as the younger sister to the lead female, who has a crush on her sister's love interest, won her fame and many accolades. She subsequently appeared in 3 more Tamil films in 2008, which, however, were less successful. These included the 1st one Jayamkondaan, next was Mahesh, Saranya Matrum Palar & finally Panchamirtham along with Jayaram . In year 2009, she had six releases, four of which being Tamil projects. Out of her Tamil releases, the tragedy sports film, Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu, directed by debutante Suseenthiran, and the supernatural thriller Eeram proved to be commercially as well as critically successful. The other two Tamil movies were A Aa E Ee with Prabhu Sir & another Tamil movie was Arumugham with Bharath and Priyamani in lead roles. Later that year, she made her Telugu debut with Village Lo Vinayakudu and made her comeback to Malayalam films, starring in Chemistry. She also did the Telugu remake of her Tamil movie titled Bheemili Kabaddi Jattu in 2010, which also did well in the box office. Then she did one more Telugu movie Happy Happy Ga the same year. Start of the year 2011 she did a Malayalam movie Ponnu Kondoru Aalroopam. Next was yet another Malayalam movie Nadakame Ulakam along with Mukesh, Vinu Mohan and Sarayu Mohan. Then she did a cameo role in the Tamil movie Azhagarsamiyin Kuthirai same year. In 2011 she also acted in M.Raja's Velayudham, which turned out to be a huge hit. Her role as Vijay's sister won her a lot of good reviews. Same year later she did a Malayalam movie Innanu Aa Kalyanam. She also acted in another film named Dharani's Osthe in the end of 2011 with Simbu in lead role. The year 2012 also she started off with a Malayalam movie Perinoru Makan. Then she had an entry to Kannada same year with her debut Kannada movie Ee Bhoomi Aa Bhanu. Then she went on to do a Tamil movie Kolagalam. In 2014 she did her 2nd Kannada movie Paramashiva starring V. Ravichandran Sir too. She continued her career with a Tamil movie Kadhalai Thavira Verondrum Illai. Then the same year she made her Bollywood debut with Badlapur Boys opposite Nishan which was the Hindi remake of her hit Tamil movie Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu. Now in year 2015 she completed yet another Tamil movie Suyam, which is yet to be released.\n\nPersonal life\n\nSaranya married her longtime boyfriend Dr.Aravind Krishnan on 6 September 2015 at Kottamkulangara Devi Temple, Alappuzha.\nThey have a son named Anantapadmanabhan Aravind and a daughter named Annapoorna Aravind.\n\nFilmography\n\nTV Serials\nMeera (Asianet) as Meera\n Swami Ayyappan (Asianet) as Malikapurathamma\nManassariyathe (Surya TV)\nKrishnakripasagaram (Amrita TV) as Ambai Pennu\nMounanombaram (Kairali TV)\nAa Amma (Kairali TV)\n\nTV Shows\nNuvvu Nenu - Telugu game show\nParayam Nedam - Malayalam game show\nCelebrity Taste - Malayalam cookery show\nRed Carpet - Malayalam reality show\n\nEndorsements\nKalyan Jewellers\n Wedland Silks & Sareees\n AVR\n Pampers\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n https://youtube.com/SaranyaMohanOfficial\n \nActress Saranya Mohan Wedding Photos\n\nActresses in Tamil cinema\nActresses in Malayalam cinema\nActresses from Alappuzha\nActresses in Telugu cinema\nActresses in Kannada cinema\nLiving people\nIndian film actresses\n21st-century Indian actresses\nIndian television actresses\nActresses in Malayalam television\nChild actresses in Malayalam cinema\n20th-century Indian actresses\n1989 births\nAnnamalai University alumni\nUniversity of Kerala alumni",
"Başak Parlak (born 3 November 1989) is a Turkish actress and model.\n\nThe breakthrough in her career came in 2007 with a role in the TV series Fikrimin İnce Gülü, followed by another role in the 2008 series Serçe. In 2013, she had a leading role in the movie Şevkat Yerimdar and reprised the role in its 2016 sequel Şevkat Yerimdar 2: Bizde Sakat Çok.\n\nIn 2017, she portrayed the character of Seda in the TV series Kış Güneşi, which lasted for 18 episodes. Between 2017 and 2018, she appeared in the TV series Şevkat Yerimdar, an adaptation of the movie with the same name.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTV series\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n1989 births\nTurkish television actresses\nTurkish film actresses\nLiving people"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)",
"Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?",
"Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie.",
"Was the movie successful?",
"The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.",
"Did she have another role in the movie?",
"But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part."
] |
C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
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Did she star in any other roles during this time?
| 4 |
Besides the role of Amanda in the Glass Menagerie, did Tallulah Bankhead star in any other roles during 1948-1952?
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Tallulah Bankhead
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Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host,
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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
| false |
[
"Kandala Venkata Pushpavalli Tayaramma (3 January 1926 – 28 April 1991), better known as Pushpavalli, was an Indian actress who worked in Telugu films. Her film work includes title roles in Miss Malini (1947), and the Telugu film Satyabhama..\n\nInitially married to I V Rangachari, Pushpavalli became the lover of the actor Gemini Ganeshan. She had two daughters with Ganeshan, Rekha and Radha. Her elder daughter is the Hindi actress Rekha.\n\nBiography\nPushpavalli was born into the Kandala family to Kandala Ramakotamma and Kandala Thathachary in Pentapadu village of West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh (at that time in Madras Presidency). She entered the film industry as a child actress, credited as Pushpavalli Tayaramma, with a small role as young Sita in the film Sampoorna Ramayanam (1936, 8 August), shot in Rajamundry in the first Studio in Andhra Region, Durga Cinitone, which was released when she was only nine years old. She was paid Rs 300/- for a three-day shoot, which was a princely sum in those days. This was followed by a few more roles as child star, and Pushpavalli's income became important to her family. Due to these preoccupations, she spent significant time in film shooting, she missed out on schooling and had only a rudimentary education. She married a Lawyer named I V Rangachari in about 1940. However, the marriage did not last (circumstances are not known) and they began living apart from 1946.\n\nPushpavalli graduated to doing adult roles with hardly any break from playing a child star. This was a necessity, because acting was the source of income for the family, and she could not afford to take a break. However, this continuity may have affected her acting career, and she was never really accepted as a leading lady. She did only a few roles as heroine, and in between did many films where she played the second lead. In all, she acted in around 20-25 Telugu and Tamil films (including child roles) and met with only moderate success. She was never a top-level star, nor did she receive any critical acclaim for her acting talents. Perhaps her biggest hit was the Telugu film Bala Nagamma (1942), where she played an important supporting role. Her 1947 film Miss Malini, where she played the lead role, received great critical acclaim from the intelligentsia, but flopped at the box office.\n\nMiss Malini (1947) also marked the acting debut of Gemini Ganesan, her future consort. Pushpavalli next worked with Ganesan in the Tamil film Chakradhari (1948), where she was the heroine, and he played a small role. After this point, the situation reversed; Ganesan became a huge star and Pushpavalli started getting only supporting roles, her films as heroine having mostly flopped. She did a few more films with Ganesan, the two got along very well together, and entered into a relationship, despite the fact that both of them were married to other people (Ganesan had married his first wife Alamelu, known informally as Bobji, at a very young age and would remain married to Bobji until his death).\n\nPushpavalli and Ganesan had two daughters together in quick succession. The eldest of them is the Bollywood actress Rekha (born in 1954) and the younger is Radha, who briefly worked in Tamil movies before marrying and moving to the United States. Ganesan did not acknowledge paternity of the girls for several years, and was only an occasional visitor to Pushpavalli's house. The relationship deteriorated quickly and the couple was soon estranged. As early as 1955, before the birth of Radha, Ganesan had secretly married the famous actress Savitri, and that relationship was publicly acknowledged as a valid marriage. This was possible because until 1956, it was legally permissible for a Hindu man to have more than one wife. Since Savitri was unmarried, it was possible for her to become Ganesan's legal second wife. Since Pushpavalli was still legally married to Rangachari (divorce was not available to Hindus at all until 1956), that option was not available to her and it was impossible for her to marry anyone else. Some sources say Pushpavalli and Ganesan were married in Tirupathi.\n\nAfter being estranged from Ganesan, Pushpavalli did a few more films, mostly minor roles, including a couple of Hindi films made by her old associates in the south Indian film industry. She did these roles in order to support her daughters, whom she brought up single-handedly in a very frugal way. The fact that Rekha became so successful in films was a source of great satisfaction to her, as was the fact that her second daughter, Radha settled very respectably in marriage to Syed Usman, a former Bollywood model in 1976. They reside in USA.\n\nPushpavalli died in 1991 of ailments associated with diabetes in Madras. She was survived by her 5 children including a son Babji, and daughters Rama, Dhanalakshmi and two daughters, Rekha and Radha by Gemini Ganesan.\n\nFilmography\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nActresses in Tamil cinema\nActresses in Telugu cinema\nIndian film actresses\n20th-century Indian actresses\nPlace of birth missing\n1926 births\nPlace of death missing\n1991 deaths\nActresses from Andhra Pradesh\nPeople from West Godavari district",
"Louie René (c. 1872 - 9 March 1955) was an English singer and actress best remembered for her performances with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the Gilbert and Sullivan contralto roles at the turn of the 20th century.\n\nRené performed with D'Oyly Carte touring companies from 1894 to 1903, except for one year, playing the principal contralto roles of the Savoy operas. For most of the period between 1906 and 1914, both in London and on tour, she served as the company's principal contralto, playing the roles of Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance and Katisha in The Mikado, among others. After this, she pursued a career in Edwardian musical comedy.\n\nEarly life and career\nBorn in St John's Wood in London, René appeared in 1892–93 with a touring company in The Mountebanks by W. S. Gilbert. The Era commented that she \"sings and plays Ultrice in admirable style\". She joined a D'Oyly Carte Opera Company touring company in March 1894, immediately playing the principal role of Lady Sophy in Utopia, Limited. The Era commented, \"Miss Louie René is seen to great advantage as Lady Sophy.\" In December of that year, she began to play the role of Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, on tour, as well as Lady Sophy.\n\nRené continued to tour with D'Oyly Carte until December 1901, playing all the principal Gilbert and Sullivan contralto roles in repertory, as well as the Marquise de Montigny in Mirette (1895), Inez de Roxas in The Chieftain (1895), Lazuli in The Lucky Star (1899), Lady Vernon in Haddon Hall (1899), Dancing Sunbeam in The Rose of Persia (1900–1901), and the Countess of Newtown in The Emerald Isle (1901). Her Savoy opera roles were Sophy, Buttercup, the Lady Jane in Patience, the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers, Katisha in The Mikado, Baroness von Krakenfeldt in The Grand Duke, Lady Sangazure in The Sorcerer, and Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard. An 1896 review said, \"The singing of Miss Louie René as Katisha was most enjoyable\". During 1902 René did other work but again toured with D'Oyly Carte in 1903, playing Little Buttercup, Katisha, Dame Carruthers and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro. After this, she was absent from the company for three years.\n\nDuring the company's 1906–07 and 1908–09 London repertory seasons, René returned to the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company to perform at the Savoy Theatre, playing all the lead Gilbert and Sullivan contralto roles, including Dame Carruthers, the Duchess of Plaza Toro, Jane, and the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe, in the first season, and Katisha, Little Buttercup, the Fairy Queen, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance, the Duchess of Plaza Toro and Dame Carruthers in the second. The Times was not impressed by René, writing: \"Miss Louie René makes a better Buttercup than was to be expected from her previous performances.\" Other reviews also expressed only modified rapture: The Penny Illustrated Paper, said, \"As Katisha ... Miss Louie René sings and acts well, though, at times, she seems a trifle lacking in humour.\" The Observer commented that she performed \"adequately, though without any particular distinction.\"\n\nLater years\nRené left D'Oyly Carte again for a year, rejoining on tour in March 1910. During this time, she appeared in her old roles, as well as in the part of Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, until December 1914. After this, she left the company for the last time (succeeded in her roles by Bertha Lewis) and pursued a career in Edwardian musical comedy. Among other productions, she appeared in Mark Blow's musical comedies Trouville and Toto, in 1919, and in a revival of A Waltz Dream late in her career.\n\nHer brother-in-law was fellow D'Oyly Carte artiste Scott Russell.\n\nRené died in Malvern in 1955, aged about 83.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nPostcard photos of René\nMore postcard photos of René\nAdditional postcard photos of René\nPhotos of René\nPhoto of René as the Duchess in The Gondoliers\n\n1872 births\n1955 deaths\nEnglish opera singers"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)",
"Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?",
"Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie.",
"Was the movie successful?",
"The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.",
"Did she have another role in the movie?",
"But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part.",
"Did she star in any other roles during this time?",
"NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring \"the glamorous, unpredictable\" Tallulah Bankhead as its host,"
] |
C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
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What happened to the show?
| 5 |
What happened to the " The Big Show", that Tallulah Bankhead hosted?
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Tallulah Bankhead
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Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings.
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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
| true |
[
"What Really Happened to the Class of '65? is an American anthology drama television series produced and aired in 1977–1978, created by Tony Bill and written by Walter Koenig The series was inspired by the bestselling book What Really Happened to the Class of '65? by David Wallechinsky and Michael Medved. It was produced by George Eckstein.\n\nSummary \nThe drama of the show revolved around the main character, played by Tony Bill, who had graduated from the class of 1965 in Bret Harte High School, and who has now returned as a teacher to the school. The show would begin with his character opening up the old school photo book, flicking to a photo, and pondering what had happened to that particular student. The show would then show the story of that student, with Bill narrating.\n\nThe show featured music from the era, and was described as \"a cross breed between Happy Days and Peyton Place\" The show debuted at 10pm on NBC on December 8, 1977.\n\nGrant High School in Van Nuys was used as a filming location for the series.\n\nCast \nTony Bill played the main character, Sam Ashley. The rest of the cast of the show featured many of the mainstay actors of the 1970s, including Cliff De Young, Leslie Nielsen, John Ritter, Annette O'Toole, Meredith Baxter Birney, John Rubinstein, Jessica Walter, and Paul Burke.\n\nEpisode list\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n What Really Happened to the Class of '65? at The Classic TV Archive\n\n1977 American television series debuts\n1978 American television series endings\n1970s American anthology television series\n1970s American drama television series\n1970s American high school television series\nNBC original programming\nTelevision series based on books\nTelevision shows set in Los Angeles",
"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"
] |
[
"Tallulah Bankhead",
"Renewed success (1948-1952)",
"Was she in any movies in 1948-1952?",
"Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie.",
"Was the movie successful?",
"The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.",
"Did she have another role in the movie?",
"But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part.",
"Did she star in any other roles during this time?",
"NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring \"the glamorous, unpredictable\" Tallulah Bankhead as its host,",
"What happened to the show?",
"The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings."
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C_43b497e0036740d2899a12ab373ee4b4_0
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Did she work with any other stars?0
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Other than Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen, did Tallulah Bankhead work with any other stars on "The Big Show"??
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Tallulah Bankhead
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Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s until Bankhead's death in 1968. In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Tallulah Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights. Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Tallulah's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Tallulah Brockman Bankhead (January 31, 1902 – December 12, 1968) was an American stage and screen actress. She was a member of the Bankhead and Brockman family, a prominent Alabama political family. Both her grandfather and her uncle served as US Senators; her father served as a US Representative in Congress for 11 terms, the final two as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Tallulah Bankhead's support of liberal causes, including the budding civil rights movement, broke with her southern contemporaries with their support of white supremacy and segregation as championed by Southern Democrats; she often opposed her own family publicly.
Primarily an actress of the stage, Bankhead appeared in several films including an award-winning performance in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944). She also had a brief but successful career on radio and made appearances on television as well.
In her personal life, Bankhead struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; she reportedly smoked 120 cigarettes a day and often talked openly about her vices. She also openly had a series of relationships with both men and women.
Bankhead supported foster children and helped families escape the Spanish Civil War and World War II. She was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1972, and the Alabama Women's Hall of Fame in 1981. During her career, Bankhead amassed nearly 300 film, stage, television and radio roles.
Early life
Tallulah Brockman Bankhead was born on January 31, 1902, in Huntsville, Alabama, to William Brockman Bankhead and Adelaide Eugenia "Ada" Bankhead (née Sledge); her great-great-grandfather, James Bankhead (1738–1799) was born in Ulster, Ireland and settled in South Carolina. "Tallu" was named after her paternal grandmother, who in turn was named after Tallulah Falls, Georgia. Her father hailed from the Bankhead-and-Brockman political family, active in the Democratic Party of the South in general and of Alabama in particular. Her father was the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940. She was the niece of Senator John H. Bankhead II and granddaughter of Senator John H. Bankhead. Her mother, Adelaide "Ada" Eugenia, was a native of Como, Mississippi, and was engaged to another man when she met William Bankhead on a trip to Huntsville to buy her wedding dress. The two fell in love at first sight and were married on January 31, 1900, in Memphis, Tennessee. Their first child, Evelyn Eugenia (January 24, 1901 – May 11, 1979), was born two months prematurely and had some vision difficulties.
The following year, Tallulah was born on her parents' second wedding anniversary, on the second floor of what is now known as the Isaac Schiffman Building. A marker was erected to commemorate the site, and in 1980 the building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Three weeks after Bankhead's birth, her mother died of blood poisoning (sepsis) on February 23, 1902. Coincidentally, her maternal grandmother had died giving birth to her mother. On her deathbed, Ada told her sister-in-law to "take care of Eugenia, Tallulah will always be able to take care of herself". Bankhead was baptized next to her mother's coffin.
William B. Bankhead was devastated by his wife's death, which sent him into a bout of depression and alcoholism. Consequently, Tallulah and her sister Eugenia were mostly reared by their paternal grandmother, Tallulah James Brockman Bankhead, at the family estate called "Sunset" in Jasper, Alabama. As a child, Bankhead was described as "extremely homely" and overweight, while her sister was slim and prettier. As a result, she did everything in her efforts to gain attention, and constantly sought her father's approval. After watching a performance at a circus, she taught herself how to cartwheel, and frequently cartwheeled about the house, sang, and recited literature that she had memorized. She was prone to throwing tantrums, rolling around the floor, and holding her breath until she was blue in the face. Her grandmother often threw a bucket of water on her to halt these outbursts.
Bankhead's famously husky voice (which she described as "mezzo-basso") was the result of chronic bronchitis due to childhood illness. She was described as a performer and an exhibitionist from the beginning, discovering at an early age that theatrics gained her the attention she desired. Finding she had a gift for mimicry, she entertained her classmates by imitating the schoolteachers. Bankhead claimed that her "first performance" was witnessed by none other than the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. Her Aunt Marie gave the famous brothers a party at her home near Montgomery, Alabama, in which the guests were asked to entertain. "I won the prize for the top performance, with an imitation of my kindergarten teacher", Bankhead wrote. "The judges? Orville and Wilbur Wright." Bankhead also found she had a prodigious memory for literature, memorizing poems and plays and reciting them dramatically.
Tallulah and Eugenia's grandmother and aunt were beginning to find the girls difficult to handle. Their father William, who was working from their Huntsville home as a lawyer, proposed enrolling the girls in a convent school (although he was a Methodist and her mother an Episcopalian). In 1912, both girls were enrolled in the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattanville, New York when Eugenia was 11 and Tallulah was 10. As William's political career brought him to Washington, the girls were enrolled in a series of different schools, each one a step closer to Washington, D.C. When Bankhead was 15, her aunt encouraged her to take more pride in her appearance, suggesting that she go on a diet to improve her confidence. Bankhead quickly matured into a southern belle. The girls were not really tamed by the schools, however, as both Eugenia and Tallulah went on to have a lot of relationships and affairs during their lives. Eugenia was more of an old romantic as she got married at 16 and ended up marrying seven times to six different men during her life, while Tallulah was a stronger and even more rebellious personality, who sought a career in acting, was into lust in her relationships even more than love, and showed no particular interest in marrying, although she did marry actor John Emery in 1937, a marriage which ended in divorce in 1941.
Bankhead was also childhood friends with American socialite, later novelist, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, the wife of American author and expatriate F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Career
Beginnings in New York (1917–1922)
At 15, Bankhead submitted her photo to Picture Play, which was conducting a contest and awarding a trip to New York plus a movie part to 12 winners based on their photographs. However, she forgot to send in her name or address with the picture. Bankhead learned that she was one of the winners while browsing the magazine at her local drugstore. Her photo in the magazine was captioned "Who is She?", urging the mystery girl to contact the paper at once. Congressman William Bankhead sent in a letter to the magazine with her duplicate photo.
Arriving in New York, Bankhead discovered that her contest win was fleeting: she was paid $75 for three weeks' work on Who Loved Him Best and had only a minor part, but she quickly found her niche in New York City. She soon moved into the Algonquin Hotel, a hotspot for the artistic and literary elite of the era, where she quickly charmed her way into the famed Algonquin Round Table of the hotel bar. She was dubbed one of the "Four Riders of the Algonquin", consisting of Bankhead, Estelle Winwood, Eva Le Gallienne, and Blyth Daly. Three of the four were non-heterosexual: Bankhead and Daly were bisexuals, and Le Gallienne was a lesbian. Bankhead's father had warned her to avoid alcohol and men when she got to New York; Bankhead later quipped "He didn't say anything about women and cocaine." The Algonquin's wild parties introduced Bankhead to cocaine and marijuana, of which she later remarked "Cocaine isn't habit-forming and I know because I've been taking it for years." Bankhead did abstain from drinking, keeping half of her promise to her father. At the Algonquin, Bankhead befriended actress Estelle Winwood. She also met Ethel Barrymore, who attempted to persuade her to change her name to Barbara. Bankhead declined, and Vanity Fair later wrote "she's the only actress on both sides of the Atlantic to be recognized by her first name only."
In 1919, after roles in three other silent films, When Men Betray (1918), Thirty a Week (1918), and The Trap (1919), Bankhead made her stage debut in The Squab Farm at the Bijou Theatre in New York. She soon realized her place was on stage rather than screen, and had roles in 39 East (1919), Footloose (1919), Nice People (1921), Everyday (1921), Danger (1922), Her Temporary Husband (1922), and The Exciters (1922). Though her acting was praised, the plays were commercially and critically unsuccessful. Bankhead had been in New York for five years, but had yet to score a significant hit. Restless, Bankhead moved to London.
Fame in Great Britain (1922–1931)
In 1923 she made her debut on the London stage at Wyndham's Theatre. She appeared in over a dozen plays in London over the next eight years, most famously in The Dancers and at the Lyric as Jerry Lamar in Avery Hopwood's The Gold Diggers. Her fame as an actress was ensured in 1924 when she played Amy in Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted. The show won the 1925 Pulitzer Prize.
While in London, Bankhead bought herself a Bentley, which she loved to drive. She was not very competent with directions and constantly found herself lost in the London streets. She would telephone a taxi-cab and pay the driver to drive to her destination while she followed behind in her car. During her eight years on the London stage and touring across Great Britain's theatres, Bankhead earned a reputation for making the most out of inferior material. For example, in her autobiography, Bankhead described the opening night of a play called Conchita:
In the second act. ... I came on carrying a monkey. ... On opening night, the monkey went berserk. ... (he) snatched my black wig from my head, leaped from my arms and scampered down to the footlights. There he paused, peered out at the audience, then waved my wig over his head. ... The audience had been giggling at the absurd plot even before this simian had at me. Now it became hysterical. What did Tallulah do in this crisis? I turned a cartwheel! The audience roared. ... After the monkey business I was afraid they might boo me. Instead I received an ovation.
Career in Hollywood (1931–1933)
Bankhead returned to the United States in 1931, but Hollywood success eluded her in her first four films of the 1930s. She rented a home at 1712 Stanley Street in Hollywood (now 1712 North Stanley Avenue) and began hosting parties that were said to "have no boundaries". Bankhead's first film was Tarnished Lady (1931), directed by George Cukor, and the pair became fast friends. Bankhead behaved herself on the set and filming went smoothly, but she found film-making to be very boring and did not have the patience for it. After over eight years of living in Great Britain and touring on their theatrical stages, she did not like living in Hollywood; when she met producer Irving Thalberg, she asked him "How do you get laid in this dreadful place?" Thalberg retorted "I'm sure you'll have no problem. Ask anyone." Although Bankhead was not very interested in making films, the opportunity to make $50,000 per film was too good to pass up. Her 1932 movie Devil and the Deep is notable for the presence of three major co-stars, with Bankhead receiving top billing over Gary Cooper, Charles Laughton, and Cary Grant; it is the only film with Cooper and Grant as the film's leading men although they share no scenes together. She later said "Dahling, the main reason I accepted [the part] was to [word of profanity implying sexual relations] that divine Gary Cooper!" Later in 1932, Bankhead starred opposite Robert Montgomery in Faithless.
Return to Broadway (1933–1938)
Returning to Broadway, Bankhead worked steadily in a series of middling plays which were, ironically, later turned into highly successful Hollywood films starring other actresses. 1933's Forsaking All Others by Edward Barry Roberts and Frank Morgan Cavett—a romantic comedy-drama in which three friends sustain a love triangle lasting several years—was a modest success for Bankhead, running 110 performances, but the 1934 film version with Joan Crawford was one of that year's bigger financial and critical successes. Similarly, Bankhead's next two short-lived plays, Jezebel by Owen Davis and Dark Victory by George Brewer Jr. and Bertram Bloch, were both transformed into high-profile, prestigious film vehicles for Bette Davis.
But Bankhead persevered, even through ill health. In 1933, while performing in Jezebel, Bankhead nearly died following a five-hour emergency hysterectomy due to gonorrhea, which she claimed she had contracted from either Gary Cooper or George Raft. Weighing only when she left the hospital, she vowed to continue her promiscuous and party lifestyle, stoically saying to her doctor "Don't think this has taught me a lesson!"
Bankhead continued to play in various Broadway performances over the next few years, gaining excellent notices for her portrayal of Elizabeth in a revival of Somerset Maugham's The Circle. However, when she appeared in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra with her then-husband John Emery, the New York Evening Post critic John Mason Brown memorably carped "Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra – and sank."
From 1936 to 1938, David O. Selznick, producer of Gone with the Wind (1939) called Bankhead the "first choice among established stars" to play Scarlett O'Hara in the upcoming film. Although her 1938 screen test for the role in black-and-white was superb, she photographed poorly in Technicolor. Selznick also reportedly believed that at age 36, she was too old to play Scarlett, who is 16 at the beginning of the film (the role eventually went to Vivien Leigh). Selznick sent Kay Brown to Bankhead to discuss the possibility of Bankhead playing brothel owner Belle Watling in the film, which she turned down.
Critical acclaim (1939–1945)
Regina and Sabina
Her brilliant portrayal of the cold and ruthless, yet fiery Regina Giddens in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes (1939) won her Variety magazine's award for Best Actress of the Year. Bankhead as Regina was lauded as "one of the most electrifying performances in American theater history". During the run, she was featured on the cover of Life. Bankhead and playwright Hellman, both formidable women, feuded over the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. Bankhead (a strong critic of communism from the mid 1930s onwards) was said to want a portion of one performance's proceeds to go to Finnish relief, and Hellman (a communist who had defended the Moscow Trials of 1936, and was a member of the Communist Party USA in 1938–40) objected strenuously, and the two women did not speak for the next quarter of a century, eventually reconciling in late 1963. Nevertheless, Bankhead called the character of Regina in Hellman's play "the best role I ever had in the theater".
Bankhead earned another Variety award and the New York Drama Critics' Award for Best Performance by an Actress followed her role in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, in which Bankhead played Sabina, the housekeeper and temptress, opposite Fredric March and Florence Eldridge (husband and wife offstage). About her work in Wilder's classic, the New York Sun wrote: "Her portrayal of Sabina has comedy and passion. How she contrives both, almost at the same time, is a mystery to mere man." She also clashed with Elia Kazan on The Skin of Our Teeth and during rehearsals of Clash by Night she called the producer, Billy Rose a "loathsome bully" who retorted that "How could anyone bully Niagara Falls?".
Lifeboat
In 1944, Alfred Hitchcock cast her as cynical journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, both critically and commercially, Lifeboat. Her superbly multifaceted performance was acknowledged as her best on film and won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. A beaming Bankhead accepted her New York trophy and exclaimed: "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"
Renewed success (1948–1952)
Bankhead appeared in a revival of Noël Coward's Private Lives, taking it on tour and then to Broadway for the better part of two years. The play's run made Bankhead a fortune. From that time, Bankhead could command 10% of the gross and was billed larger than any other actor in the cast, although she usually granted equal billing to Estelle Winwood, a frequent co-star and close friend from the 1920s through Bankhead's lifetime.
In 1950, in an effort to cut into the rating leads of The Jack Benny Program and The Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy Show, which had jumped from NBC radio to CBS radio the previous season, NBC spent millions over the two seasons of The Big Show starring "the glamorous, unpredictable" Bankhead as its host, in which she acted not only as mistress of ceremonies, but also performed monologues (often written by Dorothy Parker) and songs. Despite Meredith Willson's Orchestra and Chorus and top guest stars from Broadway, Hollywood, and radio, The Big Show, which earned rave reviews, failed to do more than dent Jack Benny and Edgar Bergen's ratings. The next season, NBC installed her as one of a half-dozen rotating hosts of NBC's The All Star Revue on Saturday nights.
Bankhead was director Irving Rapper's first choice for the role of Amanda in the film version of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie. Laurette Taylor, who originated the role of Amanda, was an idol of Bankhead's and also an alcoholic, whose brilliant performance in the original Broadway production reversed years of career decline. Rapper called Bankhead's screen test the greatest performance he had ever seen: "I thought she was going to be difficult, but she was like a child, so sweet and lovely. I was absolutely floored by her performance. It's the greatest test I've ever made or seen in my life. I couldn't believe I was seeing such reality. Bankhead was absolutely natural, so moving, so touching without even trying. The crew was stunned, too." But studio head Jack Warner rejected the idea because of his fear of Bankhead's drinking; though she promised not to drink during shooting, he refused to give her the part. The role was given to Gertrude Lawrence instead, whose acting was panned by most critics.
Late career (1952–1968)
Bankhead wrote a bestselling autobiography Tallulah: My Autobiography. (Harper & Bros., 1952) that was published in 1952. Though Bankhead's career slowed in the mid-1950s, she never faded from the public eye. Her highly public and often scandalous personal life began to undermine her reputation as a terrific actress, leading to criticism she had become a caricature of herself. Although a heavy smoker, heavy drinker, and consumer of sleeping pills, Bankhead continued to perform in the 1950s and 1960s on Broadway, radio, television, and in the occasional film, even as her body got more and more frail from the mid 1950s up until her death in 1968.
In 1953, Bankhead was enticed into appearing in a stage act at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. She was paid a then-generous $20,000 per week for her appearances, reciting scenes from famous plays, reading poetry and letters that had the audience in stitches—and she even sang a bit. Las Vegas critics bet she would flop but she was a smash, and she came back to the Sands for three years.
Addiction, illness and icon status
Around this time, Bankhead began to attract a passionate and highly loyal following of gay men, some of whom she employed as help when her lifestyle began to take a toll on her, affectionately calling them her "caddies". Though she had long struggled with addiction, her condition now worsened – she began taking dangerous cocktails of drugs to fall asleep, and her maid had to tape her arms down to prevent her from consuming pills during her periods of intermittent wakefulness. In her later years, Bankhead had serious accidents and several psychotic episodes from sleep deprivation and hypnotic drug abuse. Though she always hated being alone, her struggle with loneliness began to lapse into a depression. In 1956, playing the truth game with Tennessee Williams, she confessed, "I'm 54, and I wish always, always, for death. I've always wanted death. Nothing else do I want more."
The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show
Bankhead's most popular and perhaps best remembered television appearance was the December 3, 1957, The Ford Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Show. Bankhead played herself in the classic episode titled "The Celebrity Next Door". The part was originally slated for Bette Davis, but Davis had to bow out after cracking a vertebra. Lucille Ball was reportedly a fan of Bankhead and did a good impression of her. By the time the episode was filmed, however, both Ball and Desi Arnaz were deeply frustrated by Bankhead's behavior during rehearsals. It took her three hours to "wake up" once she arrived on the set and she often seemed drunk. She also refused to listen to the director and she did not like rehearsing. Ball and Arnaz apparently did not know about Bankhead's antipathy to rehearsals or her ability to memorize a script quickly. After rehearsals, the filming of the episode proceeded without a hitch and Ball congratulated Bankhead on her performance.
Last years on stage
In 1956, Bankhead appeared as Blanche DuBois (a character inspired by her) in a revival of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Williams had wanted Bankhead for the original production, but she turned it down. Tennessee Williams himself (they were close friends) called her Blanche "the worst I have seen", accusing her of ruining the role to appease her fans who wanted camp. She agreed with this verdict, and made an effort to conquer the audience which her own legend had drawn about her, giving a performance two weeks later of which he remarked:
"I'm not ashamed to say that I shed tears almost all the way through and that when the play was finished I rushed up to her and fell to my knees at her feet. The human drama, the play of a woman's great valor and an artist's truth, her own, far superseded, and even eclipsed, to my eye, the performance of my own play." The director remarked that her performance exceeded those of Jessica Tandy and Vivien Leigh in the role. However, the initial reviews had decided the production's fate, and the producer pulled the plug after 15 performances.
Bankhead received a Tony Award nomination for her performance of a bizarre 50-year-old mother in the short-lived Mary Coyle Chase play Midgie Purvis (1961). It was a physically demanding role and Bankhead insisted on doing the stunts herself, including sliding down a staircase banister. She received glowing reviews, but the play suffered from numerous rewrites and failed to last beyond a month. Her last theatrical appearance was in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore (1963), a revival of another Williams play, directed by Tony Richardson. She had suffered a severe burn on her right hand from a match exploding while she lit a cigarette, and it was aggravated by the importance of jewelry props in the play. She took heavy painkillers, but these dried her mouth, and most critics thought that Bankhead's line readings were unintelligible. As with Antony and Cleopatra, the nadir of her career, she only made five performances, and in the same unhappy theater.
New media
Among her last radio appearances was in an episode of the BBC's Desert Island Discs with Roy Plomley in 1964. Bankhead, at 62 and audibly suffering from breathing difficulties from emphysema in the interview, frankly spoke of how hopeless she would be on a desert island, admitting that she "couldn't put a key in the door, dahling. I can't do a thing for myself." In the interview, host Plomley spoke of Bankhead's glory days as the most celebrated actress of 1920s London. Later he recalled of their interview, "She was a very frail and ailing old lady, and I was shocked to see how old and ill she looked as I helped her out of a taxi. She had come from her hotel wearing a mink coat slung over a pair of lounging pyjamas, and she leaned heavily on my arm as I supported her to the lift. Her eyes were still fine, and there was still beauty in the bone structure of her face beneath the wrinkles and ravages of hard living. Her hands shook, and when she wished to go to the loo she had to ask Monica Chapman to accompany her to help her with her clothing."
Her last motion picture was in a British horror film, Fanatic (1965). Fanatic was released in the U.S. as Die! Die! My Darling!, which she protested, thinking it was exploiting her famous catchphrase, but did not succeed in getting it changed. During the screening she held privately for her friends, she apologized for "looking older than God's wet nurse" (in the film she wore no makeup and dyed her hair grey, and the director used very claustrophobic close-ups to accentuate her age and frailty). She called the B-movie horror flick "a piece of shit", though her performance in it was praised by critics and remains popular as a cult film and with her fans. For her role in Fanatic, she was paid $50,000. Her last appearances on television came in March 1967 as the villainous Black Widow in the Batman TV series, and in the December 17, 1967, episode of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour comedy-variety TV series, in the "Mata Hari" skit. She also appeared in NBC's famous lost Tonight Show Beatles interview that aired on May 14, 1968. Sitting behind the interview desk and beside Joe Garagiola, who was substituting for an absent Johnny Carson, she took an active role during the interview, questioning Paul McCartney and John Lennon. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were not present and were in England at the time, as noted during the interview.
Death
Bankhead moved into 230 East 62nd Street in the late 1950s, and then to a co-op at 333 East 57th Street (unit #13E).
Bankhead died at St. Luke's Hospital in Manhattan on December 12, 1968, at age 66. The cause of death was pleural double pneumonia. Her pneumonia was complicated by emphysema due to cigarette smoking and malnutrition, but it may also have been exacerbated by a strain of the flu which was endemic at that time. Her last coherent words reportedly were a garbled request for "codeine ... bourbon".
Despite claiming to be poor for much of her life, Bankhead left an estate valued at $2 million ().
A private funeral was held at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Kent County, Maryland, on December 14, 1968. A memorial service was held at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City on December 16. She was buried in Saint Paul's Churchyard, near Chestertown, Maryland, where her sister, Eugenia, lived.
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Bankhead has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6141 Hollywood Blvd.
Personal life
Bankhead was famous not only as an actress, but also for her many affairs, compelling personality, and witticisms such as, "There is less to this than meets the eye." and "I'm as pure as the driven slush." She was an extrovert, uninhibited, outspoken, and often got naked at private parties. She said that she "lived for the moment".
Bankhead was an avid baseball fan whose favorite team was the New York Giants. This was evident in one of her famous quotes, through which she gave a nod to the arts: "There have been only two geniuses in the world, Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare. But, darling, I think you'd better put Shakespeare first." Bankhead identified as an Episcopalian despite not being what might then have been called "the typical churchgoing type".
Political activism
Like her family, Bankhead was a Democrat, but even more than her father, she broke with many Southerners. She supported civil rights and strongly opposed racism and segregation. In the 1924 United States presidential election, Bankhead voted for Robert La Follette of the Progressive Party, but voted for the Democratic presidential nominee at every U.S. presidential election from 1928 to 1968, travelling back to the United States from the United Kingdom in 1924 and 1928 in order to visit her family and to place her vote in person.
In the 1948 presidential election, Bankhead supported the re-election of Harry S. Truman. At the time, Truman faced opposition not just from the Republican Party, but also from splits to his right and to his left from within the Democratic ranks. Bankhead is credited with having helped Truman immeasurably by belittling his rival, New York's Governor and Republican presidential candidate Thomas E. Dewey, as Truman defied predictions by defeating Dewey and winning the election. After Truman was elected, Bankhead was invited to sit with the president during his inauguration on January 20, 1949. While viewing the inauguration parade, she booed the South Carolina float which carried then-governor and segregationist Strom Thurmond, who had recently run against Truman on the Dixiecrat ticket, which had split the Democratic vote by running on a racist pro-segregationist ticket that appealed to most Southern Democrats.
In Democratic primaries and campaigns of later years, Bankhead supported Estes Kefauver in 1952, Adlai Stevenson II in 1956, John F. Kennedy in 1960, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 and Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Bankhead would quickly switch to campaigning for the winning Democratic nominee, such as Adlai Stevenson II in 1952 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968, if her original pick failed to win the nomination. Bankhead was close friends with Truman, Kefauver, and Stevenson.
Marriage
Bankhead married actor John Emery on August 31, 1937, at her father's home in Jasper, Alabama. Bankhead filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada, in May 1941. It was finalized on June 13, 1941. The day her divorce became final, Bankhead told a reporter, "You can definitely quote me as saying there will be no plans for a remarriage."
Bankhead had no children, but she had four abortions before she had a hysterectomy in 1933, when she was 31. She was the godmother of Brook and Brockman Seawell, children of her lifelong friend, actress Eugenia Rawls and husband Donald Seawell.
Sexuality and sexual exploits
An interview that Bankhead gave to Motion Picture magazine in 1932 generated controversy. In the interview, Bankhead ranted about the state of her life and her views on love, marriage, and children:
I'm serious about love. I'm damned serious about it now. ... I haven't had an affair for six months. Six months! Too long. ... If there's anything the matter with me now, it's not Hollywood or Hollywood's state of mind. ... The matter with me is, I WANT A MAN! ... Six months is a long, long while. I WANT A MAN!
Time ran a story about it, angering Bankhead's family. Bankhead immediately telegraphed her father, vowing never to speak with a magazine reporter again. For these and other offhand remarks, Bankhead was cited in the Hays Committee's "Doom Book", a list of 150 actors and actresses considered "unsuitable for the public" which was presented to the studios. Bankhead was at the top of the list with the heading: "Verbal Moral Turpitude". She publicly called Hays "a little prick".
Following the release of the Kinsey reports, she was quoted as stating, "I found no surprises in the Kinsey report. The good doctor's clinical notes were old hat to me. ... I've had many momentary love affairs. A lot of these impromptu romances have been climaxed in a fashion not generally condoned. I go into them impulsively. I scorn any notion of their permanence. I forget the fever associated with them when a new interest presents itself."
In 1934, Bankhead had an affair with the artist Rex Whistler who, according to his biographer Anna Thomasson, lost his virginity to her at the age of 29. Offering him what Thomasson calls "an uncomplicated crash-course in sex", Bankhead's glamour and charisma appealed to the "instinctively submissive Rex". One afternoon in early 1934, Bankhead's friend David Herbert called at her suite at the Hotel Splendide in Piccadilly, only to be informed by her maid that "Miss Bankhead is in the bath with Mr Rex Whistler". Hearing Herbert's voice down the hall, Bankhead reportedly shouted, "I'm just trying to show Rex I'm definitely a blonde!"
Rumors about Bankhead's sex life have lingered for years. In the 1920s, British domestic spy agency MI5 tried to investigate allegations she had been seducing schoolboys at Eton College but the headmaster refused to cooperate.
In addition to her many affairs with men, she was also linked romantically with female personalities of the day, including Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hattie McDaniel, Beatrice Lillie, Alla Nazimova, Blyth Daly, writers Mercedes de Acosta and Eva Le Gallienne, and singer Billie Holiday. Actress Patsy Kelly confirmed she had a sexual relationship with Bankhead when she worked for her as a personal assistant. John Gruen's Menotti: A Biography notes an incident in which Jane Bowles chased Bankhead around Capricorn, Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber's Mount Kisco estate, insisting that Bankhead needed to play the lesbian character Inès in Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit (which Paul Bowles had recently translated). Bankhead locked herself in the bathroom and kept insisting, "That lesbian! I wouldn't know a thing about it."
Bankhead never publicly used the term "bisexual" to describe herself, preferring to use the term "ambisextrous" instead.
Credits
Stage
Filmography
Radio appearances
Legacy
Bankhead is regarded as one of the great stage actresses of the 20th century, acclaimed for her natural eloquence and dynamism. She excelled in both serious and comedic roles, and for over two decades, she was among the most celebrated actresses in Broadway or London's West End, praised in the superlative "perhaps the greatest actress this country has ever produced". For the most part, Bankhead was lauded even in her failed vehicles, and she was considered by critics to be a rare and unique talent. At the height of her career, she was a "living legend", Broadway's most original leading lady. Her eccentric personality was an asset to her career rather than a hindrance, but as years of hard living took their toll, her highly publicized and often scandalous private life began to undermine her reputation. Obituaries on her passing reflected on how far she had fallen from her former grandeur, à la John Barrymore. The critic Brooks Atkinson was more candid: "Since Miss Bankhead lived as she wanted to, there is no point in deploring the loss of a talented actress". However, the legend which had ruined her career made her an enormously popular icon in both the theatrical and especially the gay community. Decades of sustained interest in Bankhead eventually realized itself in a renewed appreciation for her body of work.
Awards and honors
Among Bankhead's awards were a New York Drama Critics Award for Best Performance by an actress in The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942, as well as a Variety award in The Little Foxes and Skin. She was nominated for a Tony award for her performance in Midgie Purvis, and won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Actress in a Film for her work in Lifeboat. Bankhead was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of Ebony magazine, and was one of the very few actresses and the only stage actress to have a cover on both Time and Life. In 1928, she was honored as one of the 10 most remarkable women in London. A resolution honoring her achievements was passed in the Alabama Legislature. Bankhead was (posthumously) one of the original members of the American Theater Hall of Fame inducted upon its establishment in 1972.
In theatre
Bankhead earned her greatest acclaim for two classic roles she originated: Regina in Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes and Sabina in Thornton Wilder's The Skin of our Teeth. At the Algonquin Hotel, Bankhead left prominent impressions upon playwrights such as Zoe Akins and Rachel Crothers. Crothers later wrote the play Everyday for Bankhead, and Akins patterned the character of Eva Lovelace in her play Morning Glory on Bankhead. She became good friends with Tennessee Williams, who was immediately struck upon meeting her, describing her as "result[ing] from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger". Williams wrote four female roles for her, Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, Princess Kosmonopolis in Sweet Bird of Youth, and Flora Goforth in The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. A song in the 1937 musical I'd Rather Be Right, "Off the Record", contains the line "I'm not so fond of Bankhead, but I'd love to meet Tallulah". The Bankhead Theater (Livermore Performing Arts Center) has her namesake.
In art
A collection of 50 portraits of Bankhead in her London years is housed in the United Kingdom's National Portrait Gallery.
Augustus John painted a portrait of Bankhead in 1929 which is considered one of his greatest pieces. Frank Dobson also sculpted a bust of Bankhead during her London period.
The Library of Congress houses numerous works of Bankhead.
Biographies
Many books have been written about Bankhead's life. In chronological order, they are:
Bankhead, Tallulah. Tallulah: My Autobiography. Harper & Bros., 1952.
Gill, Brendan. Tallulah. Holt, London: Rinehart & Winston, 1972.
Israel, Lee. Miss Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Putnam Pub Group, 1972.
Tunney, Kieran. Tallulah: Darling of the Gods. New York: Dutton, 1973.
Rawls, Eugenia. Tallulah, A Memory. University of Alabama Press, 1979.
Brian, Denis. Tallulah, Darling: A Biography of Tallulah Bankhead. New York: Macmillan, 1980.
Patrick, Pamela Cowie. Tallulah Bankhead: The Darling of the Theater. Huntsville: Writers Consortium Books, 1989.
Carrier, Jeffrey. Tallulah Bankhead, A Bio-Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.
Bret, David. Tallulah Bankhead: A Scandalous Life. New York: Robson Books/Parkwest, 1997.
Lavery, Bryony. Tallulah Bankhead. Bath: Absolute Press, 1999.
Archibald, Alecia Sherard. Tallulah Bankhead: Alabama's Bad Girl Star. Alabama: Seacoast Publishing, Inc., 2003
Lobenthal, Joel. Tallulah!: The Life and times of a Leading Lady. New York: HarperCollins, 2004.
Tributes
A Tallulah Bankhead Tribute was held by the Walker County Arts Alliance in her hometown of Jasper, Alabama, on June 11–15, 2015.
A similar tribute was held for a week at the University of Alabama in Birmingham in November 1977.
In popular culture
Bankhead left a lasting impact on American culture despite modern audiences being unfamiliar with the stage performances for which she was most acclaimed. Bankhead remains far more prominent in the public imagination than contemporary Broadway actresses of her caliber, and due to her unique personality and often self-destructive behavior.
She has become a frequently imitated camp icon.
Many critics (and Bankhead herself) compared the characterization of Margo Channing in All About Eve to that of Bankhead.
The costume designer Edith Head had explicitly admitted to styling Channing's appearance to that of Bankhead.
The 1964 one-act play Dutchman by Amiri Baraka has the protagonist address the white woman antagonist by Bankhead's name repeatedly.
Bankhead's voice and personality inspired voice actress Betty Lou Gerson's work on the character Cruella De Vil in Walt Disney Pictures' One Hundred and One Dalmatians, which the studio calls "a manic take-off on famous actress Tallulah Bankhead".
A cocktail at the Ritz Hotel in London is called "The Tallulah", named for the occasion when Bankhead visited the hotel and drank champagne out of her shoe.
Fictional portrayals
In the 1969 film Goodbye, Mr. Chips, actress Siân Phillips portrays Ursula Mossbank, a character clearly inspired by the Bankhead mystique and mannerisms, but no suggestion is made in the film that that character is supposed to be Bankhead herself.
Eugenia Rawls developed a one-woman show in 1971, Tallulah, A Memory, where she portrayed her "lifetime friend" Bankhead. She later published it as a book of the same title in 1979.
In the 1980 made-for-television movie, The Scarlett O'Hara War, Carrie Nye plays Bankhead as she and many others vie for the role of Scarlett O' Hara in Gone with the Wind.
In the 1983 off-Broadway musical, Tallulah!, Helen Gallagher portrays Bankhead's life from the early days in Alabama to her New York career and centers on her relationship with her father.
Rock musician/actor Suzi Quatro portrayed Bankhead in a musical named Tallulah Who? in 1991. The musical was based on a book by Willie Rushton. The show ran from February 14 to March 9 at The Queen's Theatre, Hornchurch, UK, and received favorable reviews.
The 1995 documentary Wigstock: The Movie featured an act entitled The Dueling Bankheads whose drag stars emulate the camp icon's exaggerated style.
Character actor and self stylized "illusionist", Jim Bailey originated the role of Bankhead in the play Tallulah and Tennessee in 1999.
In her first one-woman show, Kathleen Turner played the titular character in Sandra Ryan Heyward's Tallulah from 2000 to 2001.
Valerie Harper starred as Bankhead in Looped, which premiered at The Pasadena Playhouse. It opened on Broadway on February 19, 2010, at the Lyceum Theatre.
In the 2015–2017 series Z: The Beginning of Everything, about Bankhead's childhood friend Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Christina Bennett Lind plays Bankhead.
Paget Brewster portrayed Bankhead in two episodes of the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Hollywood. The show includes a highly fictionalized version of Bankhead and her place in the 1940s Golden Age of Hollywood.
Bankhead has been variously portrayed by Tovah Feldshuh in both Tallulah's Party, which opened in 1998 at the Martin R. Kaufman Theater and in Feldshuh and Linda Selman's original Tallulah Hallelujah!, which opened at the Douglas Fairbanks Theater Off Broadway in 2000.
Natasha Lyonne portrayed Bankhead in the 2021 Hulu film The United States vs. Billie Holiday. The film portrayed Holiday and Bankhead as having a sexual relationship. This relationship is speculative, albeit possible, as the two knew one another and were friends in reality.
References
Notes
Bibliography
Further reading
External links
1902 births
1968 deaths
20th-century American actresses
20th-century American non-fiction writers
20th-century American women writers
Alabama Democrats
American autobiographers
American stage actresses
American silent film actresses
American film actresses
American people of Scotch-Irish descent
American radio actresses
American television actresses
Bankhead family
Bisexual actresses
Burials in Maryland
Deaths from emphysema
Deaths from pneumonia in New York (state)
American bisexual actors
LGBT people from Alabama
Mary Baldwin University alumni
New York Film Critics Circle Awards
People from Jasper, Alabama
Writers from Alabama
Women autobiographers
American women non-fiction writers
American Episcopalians
New York (state) Democrats
Algonquin Round Table
American women activists
Activists from Alabama
Activists for African-American civil rights
20th-century LGBT people
| false |
[
"Frida Palmér, (February 14, 1905 - October 13, 1966) was the first female Swedish astronomer with a doctorate. She studied variable stars.\n\nEarly life\n\nPalmér was born on February 14, 1905 in Blentarp, Sweden, the only child to builder Hans Persson Palmér and his wife Elsa Jeppsson. Her father died when she was five years old and in 1910 Elsa moved to Järrestad. It is unclear how she finished her early education but she must have been somewhat self-taught as access to high school was not formally established for girls until 1928.\n\nEducation\n\nIn the fall of 1925, Palmér studied at the Faculty of Philosophy in Lund where she studied astronomy and mathematics. She studied under her mentor and friend, Knut Lundmark and in 1930 was able to get a large grant to travel and visit observatories abroad in Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Potsdam, Danzig (now Gdansk) and Berlin. She was courageous and made a startling impression as a young women in a field dominated by men.\n\nShe defended her thesis in 1939 at Lund University on a thesis on irregular variable stars with Knut Lundmark as supervisor. She is the first Swedish female doctor in astronomy.\n\nCareer\nShe listed over 259 stars with irregular periodicity variability, examined their galactic distribution, arranged by spectral type. Most spectra lacked the lines typical of the Mira variable stars. She discovered that the light curves of some stars could be interpreted as interference between two or more simultaneous, periodic events in the stars.\n\nHer academic career was stopped short because of World War II and she started work at the Swedish National Defence Radio Establishment as a cryptographer systems analyst. Palmer decoded Soviet marine signaling messages in the Arctic Ocean. Palmer never got any real recognition from cryptography colleagues Gunnar Blom and Sven Wäsström, who considered her an insignificant \"star analyst\".\n\nThe Supreme Chief, Commander Torgil Thorén, however, stated in 1943 that she always \"attended to prompt perception, energy and a clear sense of order\" and that \"she always included the work with interest and diligence and observed impeccable and honest conduct\".\n\nIn 1945, while still employed at FRA, she published a list of another 98 red variable stars, the largest uniform compilation of non-Mira variable stars. She was seriously considered for a travel scholarship for \"academically educated women\" to do research in the United States but was not chosen. In 1945, at only 41 she gave up on her career as an astronomer to become a professor in Halmstad and look after her aging mother. While a qualified and dedicated teacher she had low tolerance for students who did not understand mathematics and physics. Her students feared going up to the blackboard to answer questions in front of her. She certainly did not enjoy being a teacher and yearned to return to her previous life.\n\nWhen Elsa died Frida opened her social circle and started an Association for Working Women in Stockholm. She continued to travel and went to Cairo, Egypt in 1963.\n\nPalmér died on October 13, 1966 in Halmstad, Sweden. The Frida Palmér Observatory at Halmstad University in south Sweden is named after her.\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading \n \n\n20th-century Swedish astronomers\nSwedish women scientists\n1905 births\n1966 deaths\nPeople from Sjöbo Municipality\nLund University alumni",
"Chelsie Kay Hightower (born July 21, 1989) is a ballroom dancer. She is known for being a regular dance partner, trainer and choreographer on the ABC competition show Dancing with the Stars, on which she was a professional from Season 8 to 15, excluding Season 13.\n\nBiography\nChelsie Kay Hightower was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, and raised in Orem, Utah with five older brothers and her mother and father until they divorced in 2006. She started dancing when she was nine years old and received conventional training since the age of 14. She has been trained in ballroom, jazz, ballet, and hip-hop. Hightower has performed in musical theaters across the United States and won her first national title when she was 11. She was a U.S. Worlds finalist in 2005, and competed on Team USA during the British Open in Blackpool, England. She graduated from Timpanogos High School, then attended Utah Valley University.\n\nSo You Think You Can Dance\nAt age 18, she made her television debut on season four of So You Think You Can Dance. She is highly remembered for her Emmy nominated performances with Mark Kanemura to a revision of \"Bleeding Love\" by Leona Lewis choreographed by Nappytabs and with Joshua Allen to \"A Los Amigos\" choreographed by Dmitry Chaplin. She was eliminated from the U.S. reality TV show on July 31, 2008, after making it to the top six. Hightower was a part of one of the two couples who avoided being in the bottom 3 couples in Season 4. She returned in season eight as an All-Star and in season 10 as a choreographer and All-Star.\n\nSo You Think You Can Dance performances\n\nDancing with the Stars\nHightower joined the season eight cast of Dancing with the Stars as a professional dancer, and was partnered with Ty Murray, a nine-time World Champion rodeo cowboy. On May 12, 2009, she and Murray were eliminated from the competition with a 4th-place finish. This is Hightower's best finish to date. Her partner for season nine was professional snowboarder Louie Vito. They were eliminated in week six of the competition, and came in eighth place. For season ten she was partnered with The Bachelor star Jake Pavelka. They were voted off in week six of the competition, and came in seventh place. She was paired with Michael Bolton in season 11. The couple were eliminated in week two. For season 12 she was partnered with rapper and actor Romeo Miller. They were eliminated in week eight of the competition, and came in fifth place. She was not on season 13 (2011), but returned in season 14 (2012) partnered with Disney Channel star Roshon Fegan. The couple was eliminated on week eight, finishing in sixth place. Hightower earned her highest score and her best average with any partner with Fegan earning 29/30 for their Foxtrot and earning an average of 25.7. For season 15 (the first \"all-stars\" season), she was partnered with season five winner Hélio Castroneves. They were voted off during a double elimination in week three and finished in 10th place.\n\nHightower made an appearance in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Winter 2010 edition (pages 152 and 153) along with three other couples from Dancing with the Stars. On July 8, 2010, she received an Emmy nomination for the \"Paso doble/Malagueña\" dance that she and Derek Hough performed and co-choreographed for season ten.\n\nHightower has performed with singer-songwriter Jewel (Ty Murray's wife) in concert on Jewel's hit \"Hands.\"\n\nDancing With the Stars performances\nChelsie's average score from all her partners is 21.03 points.\n\nSeason 8 with Ty Murray (average: 22.4)\n\nSeason 9 with Louie Vito (average: 19.5)\n\nDue to Len Goodman's absence in week two, the 7 was awarded by stand-in guest judge Baz Luhrmann.\n\nSeason 10 with Jake Pavelka (average: 20.4)\n\nSeason 11 with Michael Bolton (average: 14.0)\n\nSeason 12 with Romeo Miller (average: 23.6)\n\nScores for weeks 1 & 2 were combined and first results were revealed on March 29, 2011\nWeek seven guest judge Donnie Burns score is before Carrie Ann's\nAverage score does not include guest judge's score on week seven\n\nSeason 14 with Roshon Fegan (average: 25.7)\n\nAverage score does not include marathon dance in week six\n\nSeason 15 with Hélio Castroneves (average: 23.3)\n\nOther dance work\nFrom November 1, 2014, through April 19, 2015, Hightower performed with Dancing Pros Live, a touring show in which five dance couples compete and then the audience picks the winner. She was joined on the 50+ city tour by fellow Dancing with the Stars alumni, Edyta Śliwińska and Karina Smirnoff who acted as judges.\n\nOther dance achievements\n2005: U.S. Representative to the Worlds \n2005: U.S. National Standard Finalist \n2005: 10 Dance National Youth Champion\n2006: International Latin Finalist\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\n1989 births\nAmerican ballroom dancers\nLiving people\nPeople from the Las Vegas Valley\nSo You Think You Can Dance (American TV series) contestants\nUtah Valley University alumni\n21st-century American dancers"
] |
[
"Maurice Malpas",
"Dundee United"
] |
C_35f91d9908224f0e982ca37b9309ed5e_1
|
What was the Dundee United
| 1 |
What was the Dundee United?
|
Maurice Malpas
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Malpas was born in Dunfermline Fife. and played youth football for Leven Royals. He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree, and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983-84 European Cup United reached the semi final. United made it to the 1986/87 UEFA Cup Final. En route they defeated Terry Venables' F.C. Barcelona side featuring Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at home and away in the quarter finals. Kevin Gallacher scored the only goal in the first leg at home. Ian Redford delivered the free kick headed home by John Clark for a 2nd leg equaliser at Camp Nou. This prompted Lineker to prophetically say to one of the United players, 'this mob'll just chuck it.' Iain Ferguson then scored a second for United nodding in Paul Sturrock's cross to win 3-1 on aggregate. In the semi final they drew 0-0 at home to Borussia Monchengladbach. In the return leg in Germany they inflicted Borussia's first home defeat in Europe in 55 games going back to 1970. Ferguson put United ahead just before half time. Redford capped the United performance with a last minute goal to seal a 2-0 win. Billy Thomson was injured after five minutes of the final first leg diving at the feet of Lennart Nilsson and needed five stitches for a blow just behind his left ear. Some reports said Thomson almost lost his ear. Thomson though repelled attack after attack and was beaten only once when Stefan Pettersson scored. McLean described Thomson's performance as "magnificent". Despite Clark scoring in the final in the 1-1 second leg draw at Tannadice, United lost 2-1 on aggregate. United played in the Scottish Cup Final in 1987. Ferguson had a much disputed extra time goal disallowed. Five minutes later name sake Ian Ferguson scored the only goal of the game for a 1-0 St Mirren win. Gallagher had United ahead the year after when they lost 2-1 to Celtic. In 1991 Dave Bowman, John O'Neil and Darren Jackson scored in the 4-3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers. Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008. CANNOTANSWER
|
He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career
|
Maurice Daniel Robert Malpas (born 3 August 1962) is a Scottish football player and coach. He signed for Dundee United in 1979 and spent his entire professional playing career with the club until his retirement in 2000. With him, United were Scottish champions in 1983 and Scottish Cup winners in 1994. European runs there included reaching the 1983–84 European Cup semi final and the 1987 UEFA Cup Final.
Malpas made his debut for the Scotland national team in 1984. He went on to gain 55 caps, making him a member of the Scotland national football team roll of honour. He played for Scotland at two World Cups and one UEFA European Championship final tournaments.
Malpas began a coaching career in 1991 whilst still a Dundee United player, continuing as a coach after his retirement until leaving the club in 2003. He joined Motherwell as assistant manager to Terry Butcher before becoming manager from 2006 until 2007. He coached the Scotland under-21 team on a temporary basis before another brief spell in club management with Swindon Town during 2008. More recently he has been assistant manager to Butcher at both Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Hibernian.
Playing career
Dundee United
Malpas was born in Dunfermline, Fife and played youth football for Leven Royals.
He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University), and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983–84 European Cup, United reached the semi final.
United made it to the final of the 1986–87 UEFA Cup; en-route they defeated Terry Venables' FC Barcelona side home and away in the quarter-final, and inflicted a first home defeat on Borussia Mönchengladbach in 55 European games going back to 1970 in the semi-final. They lost 2–1 on aggregate to IFK Gothenburg in the final, the second leg of which was their 70th match of the season.
United and Malpas played in five Scottish Cup finals in nine years: in 1985 they took the lead but lost 2–1 to Celtic. In 1987 (played in between the two legs of the UEFA Cup final) they lost 1–0 St Mirren. In 1988 against Celtic, the pattern of 1985 was almost repeated but this time it was an even later goal which defeated United. In 1991, they suffered a 4–3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers.
Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008.
Scotland
Winning first of his caps in 1984, Malpas is the most recent part-time professional to have played for Scotland. He won 55 caps in total. In his 50th international appearance (away to Norway in June 1992) he was made captain to mark the occasion. He appeared for Scotland at the 1986 and 1990 World Cups and at Euro 1992.
Coaching and managerial career
After retiring as a player, Malpas assumed full-time coaching duties at Tannadice, having been acting as player/coach since 1991. He was part of the temporary management team following the dismissal of Alex Smith in October 2002, but left the club in January 2003.
He initially joined Motherwell as assistant manager to former coaching colleague Terry Butcher. Malpas became Motherwell manager in May 2006, following Butcher's departure to coach Sydney FC. He left the club in June 2007 after one season in charge, having taken the team from a comfortable mid-table position to one that narrowly avoided relegation. Malpas became caretaker manager of the Scotland under-21 team in August 2007, but missed out on the permanent position to Billy Stark.
In January 2008, Malpas became manager of Swindon Town after the takeover of the club by local businessman Andrew Fitton, replacing former Dundee United teammate Paul Sturrock. Malpas was sacked by chairman Andrew Fitton on 14 November 2008 after a poor run of results and shock exits in the FA Cup to Histon and in the Football League Trophy within a week. He joined Terry Butcher again as assistant, this time at SPL club Inverness Caledonian Thistle. In 2013, Malpas moved with Butcher to Hibernian, rejecting the chance to manage Inverness. Butcher and Malpas both left Hibernian in June 2014, after the club had been relegated from the Scottish Premiership.
Malpas became director of football at Raith Rovers on 26 December 2014. He left Raith Rovers on 22 May 2015 and was inducted to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in October 2015.
Malpas returned to Inverness Caledonian Thistle in April 2017, working for manager Richie Foran.
Managerial statistics
Honours
Club
Dundee United
Scottish League Premier Division: 1982–83
Scottish Cup: 1993–94
Runner-up 1984–85, 1986–87, 1987–88, 1990–91
Scottish League Cup runner-up: 1984–85, 1997–98
UEFA Cup runner-up: 1986–87
Scottish Challenge Cup runner-up: 1995–96
Individual
SFWA Footballer of the Year: 1991
Scottish FA International Roll of Honour: 1992
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductee: 2015
See also
List of footballers in Scotland by number of league appearances (500+)
List of one-club men in association football
List of Scotland national football team captains
References
External links
1962 births
1986 FIFA World Cup players
1990 FIFA World Cup players
Dundee United F.C. non-playing staff
Dundee United F.C. players
Hibernian F.C. non-playing staff
Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. non-playing staff
Living people
Motherwell F.C. managers
Motherwell F.C. non-playing staff
Scotland international footballers
Scotland under-21 international footballers
Scottish Football League players
Scottish football managers
Scottish footballers
Scottish Premier League managers
Scottish Premier League players
Footballers from Dunfermline
Swindon Town F.C. managers
English Football League managers
UEFA Euro 1992 players
Scotland national under-21 football team managers
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductees
Association football fullbacks
| true |
[
"The 1990 Scottish Challenge Cup Final, also known as the B&Q Centenary Cup for sponsorship reasons, was an association football match between Ayr United and Dundee on 11 November 1990 at Fir Park in Motherwell. It was the final match of what was intended to be a one-off tournament organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Scottish Football League however it continued for the next season. The match marked the first time Ayr United had reached the final of a national cup competition in its 80-year history whilst it was Dundee's first since contesting the 1980 Scottish League Cup Final ten years beforehand.\n\nThe tournament was contested by clubs below the Scottish Premier Division with both finalists from the First Division. Ayr United scored first through Ian McAllister after 12 minutes but Billy Dodds scored twice to give Dundee a 2–1 lead; his first a penalty kick and second a header in the 72nd minute. Three minutes later David Smyth scored Ayr United's second goal to level the match at 2–2 to force extra time. During extra time Billy Dodds scored to complete a hat-trick which was enough for Dundee to win the match 3–2.\n\nRoute to the final\n\nAyr United \n\nAyr United entered the competition in the first round along with 23 other clubs from the First and Second Divisions; four clubs received random byes into the second round to even the number of fixtures. Ayr United's first match was against Brechin City and comfortably won 3–0 at Somerset Park. The club then faced Montrose away from home at Links Park. The score was level after 90 minutes but Ayr United scored to win 3–2 after extra time. With eight clubs left in the competition, Ayr United faced Queen of the South at home and won 4–1 to progress to the semi-finals where they won 2–0 against Clyde to earn a place in the final; the first national final in the club's history.\n\nDundee \n\nDundee received a random bye in the first round to earn automatic qualification for the second round of the tournament without playing a match. The club's first encounter was against Alloa Athletic and resulted in a 5–3 win away from home in the second round. In the next round Dundee travelled to Stark's Park to face Raith Rovers. The score was 0–0 after 90 minutes but Dundee scored to win the match 1–0 after extra time to progress to the semi-finals. The match was against Kilmarnock at Rugby Park with a high attendance. Dundee won 2–0 to reach the final of the tournament; their first national final since losing the 1980 Scottish League Cup Final to Dundee United.\n\nMatch\n\nSummary\n\nDetails\n\nReferences\n\n1990\nChallenge Cup Final\nAyr United F.C. matches\nDundee F.C. matches",
"The Evening Telegraph Challenge Cup (initially known as the City of Discovery Cup) was a pre-season football played in 2005 and 2006, based in Dundee, involving the two Dundee clubs - Dundee and Dundee United.\n\nFormat\nThe 2006 format was a single match between the two Dundee clubs, although the inaugural competition (2005) was a standard four-team knock-out competition.\n\nHistory\nThe Cup's inaugural showing was a standard four-team cup format, which saw Dundee United beat Sheffield Wednesday 2–1 in the final. United beat rivals Dundee in the first semi-final, while Sheffield Wednesday saw off Wolverhampton Wanderers on penalties in the other.\n\nOn 29 March 2006, it was announced the 2006 tournament would be slimmed down to a single derby match between Dundee and Dundee United. On 22 June 2006, sponsorship was announced for the competition, which would see it renamed the Evening Telegraph Challenge Cup; Radio Tay would also sponsor the event. The match was preceded by celebrity and fans matches.\n\nIn 2007, the tournament was to be scheduled for an international weekend during the season, as Dundee United played Barcelona and did not wish to play a pre-season derby so close after that match. However, the season passed without the match being played. The fixture was not announced for the following season either and has not been contested since.\n\nPast tournaments/winners\n\n2005\nSemi-finals\n\n3rd place play-off\n\nFinal\n\n2006\nFinal\n\nWinners\n1\n Dundee\n Dundee United\n\nTop goalscorers\n\nTrivia\n Both finals were held at Dens Park.\n\nReferences\n\nSports competitions in Dundee\nScottish football friendly trophies\nDefunct football cup competitions in Scotland\nFootball in Dundee"
] |
[
"Maurice Malpas",
"Dundee United",
"What was the Dundee United",
"He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career"
] |
C_35f91d9908224f0e982ca37b9309ed5e_1
|
What did he do for dundee united?
| 2 |
What did Maurice Malpas do for Dundee United?
|
Maurice Malpas
|
Malpas was born in Dunfermline Fife. and played youth football for Leven Royals. He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree, and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983-84 European Cup United reached the semi final. United made it to the 1986/87 UEFA Cup Final. En route they defeated Terry Venables' F.C. Barcelona side featuring Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at home and away in the quarter finals. Kevin Gallacher scored the only goal in the first leg at home. Ian Redford delivered the free kick headed home by John Clark for a 2nd leg equaliser at Camp Nou. This prompted Lineker to prophetically say to one of the United players, 'this mob'll just chuck it.' Iain Ferguson then scored a second for United nodding in Paul Sturrock's cross to win 3-1 on aggregate. In the semi final they drew 0-0 at home to Borussia Monchengladbach. In the return leg in Germany they inflicted Borussia's first home defeat in Europe in 55 games going back to 1970. Ferguson put United ahead just before half time. Redford capped the United performance with a last minute goal to seal a 2-0 win. Billy Thomson was injured after five minutes of the final first leg diving at the feet of Lennart Nilsson and needed five stitches for a blow just behind his left ear. Some reports said Thomson almost lost his ear. Thomson though repelled attack after attack and was beaten only once when Stefan Pettersson scored. McLean described Thomson's performance as "magnificent". Despite Clark scoring in the final in the 1-1 second leg draw at Tannadice, United lost 2-1 on aggregate. United played in the Scottish Cup Final in 1987. Ferguson had a much disputed extra time goal disallowed. Five minutes later name sake Ian Ferguson scored the only goal of the game for a 1-0 St Mirren win. Gallagher had United ahead the year after when they lost 2-1 to Celtic. In 1991 Dave Bowman, John O'Neil and Darren Jackson scored in the 4-3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers. Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008. CANNOTANSWER
|
Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983.
|
Maurice Daniel Robert Malpas (born 3 August 1962) is a Scottish football player and coach. He signed for Dundee United in 1979 and spent his entire professional playing career with the club until his retirement in 2000. With him, United were Scottish champions in 1983 and Scottish Cup winners in 1994. European runs there included reaching the 1983–84 European Cup semi final and the 1987 UEFA Cup Final.
Malpas made his debut for the Scotland national team in 1984. He went on to gain 55 caps, making him a member of the Scotland national football team roll of honour. He played for Scotland at two World Cups and one UEFA European Championship final tournaments.
Malpas began a coaching career in 1991 whilst still a Dundee United player, continuing as a coach after his retirement until leaving the club in 2003. He joined Motherwell as assistant manager to Terry Butcher before becoming manager from 2006 until 2007. He coached the Scotland under-21 team on a temporary basis before another brief spell in club management with Swindon Town during 2008. More recently he has been assistant manager to Butcher at both Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Hibernian.
Playing career
Dundee United
Malpas was born in Dunfermline, Fife and played youth football for Leven Royals.
He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University), and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983–84 European Cup, United reached the semi final.
United made it to the final of the 1986–87 UEFA Cup; en-route they defeated Terry Venables' FC Barcelona side home and away in the quarter-final, and inflicted a first home defeat on Borussia Mönchengladbach in 55 European games going back to 1970 in the semi-final. They lost 2–1 on aggregate to IFK Gothenburg in the final, the second leg of which was their 70th match of the season.
United and Malpas played in five Scottish Cup finals in nine years: in 1985 they took the lead but lost 2–1 to Celtic. In 1987 (played in between the two legs of the UEFA Cup final) they lost 1–0 St Mirren. In 1988 against Celtic, the pattern of 1985 was almost repeated but this time it was an even later goal which defeated United. In 1991, they suffered a 4–3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers.
Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008.
Scotland
Winning first of his caps in 1984, Malpas is the most recent part-time professional to have played for Scotland. He won 55 caps in total. In his 50th international appearance (away to Norway in June 1992) he was made captain to mark the occasion. He appeared for Scotland at the 1986 and 1990 World Cups and at Euro 1992.
Coaching and managerial career
After retiring as a player, Malpas assumed full-time coaching duties at Tannadice, having been acting as player/coach since 1991. He was part of the temporary management team following the dismissal of Alex Smith in October 2002, but left the club in January 2003.
He initially joined Motherwell as assistant manager to former coaching colleague Terry Butcher. Malpas became Motherwell manager in May 2006, following Butcher's departure to coach Sydney FC. He left the club in June 2007 after one season in charge, having taken the team from a comfortable mid-table position to one that narrowly avoided relegation. Malpas became caretaker manager of the Scotland under-21 team in August 2007, but missed out on the permanent position to Billy Stark.
In January 2008, Malpas became manager of Swindon Town after the takeover of the club by local businessman Andrew Fitton, replacing former Dundee United teammate Paul Sturrock. Malpas was sacked by chairman Andrew Fitton on 14 November 2008 after a poor run of results and shock exits in the FA Cup to Histon and in the Football League Trophy within a week. He joined Terry Butcher again as assistant, this time at SPL club Inverness Caledonian Thistle. In 2013, Malpas moved with Butcher to Hibernian, rejecting the chance to manage Inverness. Butcher and Malpas both left Hibernian in June 2014, after the club had been relegated from the Scottish Premiership.
Malpas became director of football at Raith Rovers on 26 December 2014. He left Raith Rovers on 22 May 2015 and was inducted to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in October 2015.
Malpas returned to Inverness Caledonian Thistle in April 2017, working for manager Richie Foran.
Managerial statistics
Honours
Club
Dundee United
Scottish League Premier Division: 1982–83
Scottish Cup: 1993–94
Runner-up 1984–85, 1986–87, 1987–88, 1990–91
Scottish League Cup runner-up: 1984–85, 1997–98
UEFA Cup runner-up: 1986–87
Scottish Challenge Cup runner-up: 1995–96
Individual
SFWA Footballer of the Year: 1991
Scottish FA International Roll of Honour: 1992
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductee: 2015
See also
List of footballers in Scotland by number of league appearances (500+)
List of one-club men in association football
List of Scotland national football team captains
References
External links
1962 births
1986 FIFA World Cup players
1990 FIFA World Cup players
Dundee United F.C. non-playing staff
Dundee United F.C. players
Hibernian F.C. non-playing staff
Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. non-playing staff
Living people
Motherwell F.C. managers
Motherwell F.C. non-playing staff
Scotland international footballers
Scotland under-21 international footballers
Scottish Football League players
Scottish football managers
Scottish footballers
Scottish Premier League managers
Scottish Premier League players
Footballers from Dunfermline
Swindon Town F.C. managers
English Football League managers
UEFA Euro 1992 players
Scotland national under-21 football team managers
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductees
Association football fullbacks
| true |
[
"The Dundee by-election, 1924 was a by-election held on 22 December 1924 for the British House of Commons constituency of Dundee, in Scotland. It was won by the Labour Party candidate, Thomas Johnston.\n\nVacancy \nThe Labour Party MP E. D. Morel had died on 25 November 1924, aged 51. Morel had held the seat since the 1922 general election, when he had famously defeated Winston Churchill.\n\nCandidates \nThe by-election was contested by only two candidates, both of whom were MPs who had been defeated elsewhere at the 1924 general election.\n\nThe Labour candidate was 42-year-old Thomas Johnston, who had been MP for Stirling and Clackmannan Western from 1922 to 1924. His only opponent was the Liberal candidate Ernest Simon, an English industrialist who had been MP for Manchester Withington from 1923.\n\nResult \nOn a turnout barely half that of the general election in October, Johnston held the seat for Labour, with more than 69% of the vote. He did not contest the seat at the 1929 general election, when he was re-elected for his old constituency of Stirling and Clackmannan Western, and went on to become Secretary of State for Scotland from 1941 to 1945.\n\nSimon was re-elected in 1929 for his old Withington seat, but lost it in 1931, and did not return to the House of Commons. He later joined the Labour Party, and in 1947 he was ennobled and appointed Chairman of the Board of Governors of the BBC.\n\nVotes\n\nSee also\nDundee (UK Parliament constituency)\nDundee\nList of United Kingdom by-elections (1918–1931)\n1908 Dundee by-election\n1917 Dundee by-election\n\nSources \n\n \n\nBy-elections to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in Scottish constituencies\n1924 elections in the United Kingdom\n1924 in Scotland\n1920s elections in Scotland\n20th century in Dundee\nBy-elections to the Parliament of the United Kingdom in Dundee constituencies\nDecember 1924 events",
"James Thompson Bissett (19 June 1898 – after 1932) was a Scottish footballer who made 140 appearances in the Football League playing for Southend United, Rochdale, Middlesbrough and Lincoln City. He played as a right back. He was manager of Dundee from 1928 to 1933.\n\nLife and career\nBissett was born in Lochee, Dundee, and began his football career with his local professional club, Dundee F.C. He moved to England in early 1920 to sign for Football League First Division club Everton for a £250 fee, At the end of the season he was transfer-listed at the same valuation, but by October, when the player applied to have the fee reduced, the directors decided to invite offers. Interest from Southern League club Ebbw Vale did not result in a permanent move, and eventually, in the 1922 close season, Bissett was allowed to leave on a free transfer to Southend United of the Third Division South.\n\nHe made his debut on the opening day of the 1922–23 Football League season in a 2–0 win away at Newport County: according to the Daily Express, \"[his] work left nothing to be desired\". He played regularly for Southend, and the following season was ever-present for Rochdale, and converted three penalties, as they finished second in the Third Division North, only one point behind champions Wolverhampton Wanderers. He signed for Middlesbrough, newly relegated from the First Division, as soon as the season ended.\n\nBissett went straight into Middlesbrough's starting eleven for the new campaign, and was a regular selection until the end of January 1925. He next appeared for the first team more than a year later, playing the last nine matches of the 1925–26 season. He then returned to the Third Division, signing for Lincoln City for what the Express called \"a substantial fee\". He played in 32 matches in his first season, and in the opening match of the next, and then returned to his native Scotland where he was on the books of Dundee and Raith Rovers.\n\nFrom 1928 to 1933, Bissett was manager of Dundee.\n\nReferences\n\n1898 births\nYear of death missing\nFootballers from Dundee\nScottish footballers\nAssociation football fullbacks\nDundee F.C. players\nEverton F.C. players\nEbbw Vale F.C. players\nSouthend United F.C. players\nRochdale A.F.C. players\nMiddlesbrough F.C. players\nLincoln City F.C. players\nRaith Rovers F.C. players\nEnglish Football League players\nScottish football managers\nDundee F.C. managers\nPlace of death missing\nPeople from Lochee"
] |
[
"Maurice Malpas",
"Dundee United",
"What was the Dundee United",
"He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career",
"What did he do for dundee united?",
"Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983."
] |
C_35f91d9908224f0e982ca37b9309ed5e_1
|
Did he recieve any awards?
| 3 |
DidMaurice Malpas receive any awards?
|
Maurice Malpas
|
Malpas was born in Dunfermline Fife. and played youth football for Leven Royals. He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree, and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983-84 European Cup United reached the semi final. United made it to the 1986/87 UEFA Cup Final. En route they defeated Terry Venables' F.C. Barcelona side featuring Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at home and away in the quarter finals. Kevin Gallacher scored the only goal in the first leg at home. Ian Redford delivered the free kick headed home by John Clark for a 2nd leg equaliser at Camp Nou. This prompted Lineker to prophetically say to one of the United players, 'this mob'll just chuck it.' Iain Ferguson then scored a second for United nodding in Paul Sturrock's cross to win 3-1 on aggregate. In the semi final they drew 0-0 at home to Borussia Monchengladbach. In the return leg in Germany they inflicted Borussia's first home defeat in Europe in 55 games going back to 1970. Ferguson put United ahead just before half time. Redford capped the United performance with a last minute goal to seal a 2-0 win. Billy Thomson was injured after five minutes of the final first leg diving at the feet of Lennart Nilsson and needed five stitches for a blow just behind his left ear. Some reports said Thomson almost lost his ear. Thomson though repelled attack after attack and was beaten only once when Stefan Pettersson scored. McLean described Thomson's performance as "magnificent". Despite Clark scoring in the final in the 1-1 second leg draw at Tannadice, United lost 2-1 on aggregate. United played in the Scottish Cup Final in 1987. Ferguson had a much disputed extra time goal disallowed. Five minutes later name sake Ian Ferguson scored the only goal of the game for a 1-0 St Mirren win. Gallagher had United ahead the year after when they lost 2-1 to Celtic. In 1991 Dave Bowman, John O'Neil and Darren Jackson scored in the 4-3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers. Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008. CANNOTANSWER
|
Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000.
|
Maurice Daniel Robert Malpas (born 3 August 1962) is a Scottish football player and coach. He signed for Dundee United in 1979 and spent his entire professional playing career with the club until his retirement in 2000. With him, United were Scottish champions in 1983 and Scottish Cup winners in 1994. European runs there included reaching the 1983–84 European Cup semi final and the 1987 UEFA Cup Final.
Malpas made his debut for the Scotland national team in 1984. He went on to gain 55 caps, making him a member of the Scotland national football team roll of honour. He played for Scotland at two World Cups and one UEFA European Championship final tournaments.
Malpas began a coaching career in 1991 whilst still a Dundee United player, continuing as a coach after his retirement until leaving the club in 2003. He joined Motherwell as assistant manager to Terry Butcher before becoming manager from 2006 until 2007. He coached the Scotland under-21 team on a temporary basis before another brief spell in club management with Swindon Town during 2008. More recently he has been assistant manager to Butcher at both Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Hibernian.
Playing career
Dundee United
Malpas was born in Dunfermline, Fife and played youth football for Leven Royals.
He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University), and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983–84 European Cup, United reached the semi final.
United made it to the final of the 1986–87 UEFA Cup; en-route they defeated Terry Venables' FC Barcelona side home and away in the quarter-final, and inflicted a first home defeat on Borussia Mönchengladbach in 55 European games going back to 1970 in the semi-final. They lost 2–1 on aggregate to IFK Gothenburg in the final, the second leg of which was their 70th match of the season.
United and Malpas played in five Scottish Cup finals in nine years: in 1985 they took the lead but lost 2–1 to Celtic. In 1987 (played in between the two legs of the UEFA Cup final) they lost 1–0 St Mirren. In 1988 against Celtic, the pattern of 1985 was almost repeated but this time it was an even later goal which defeated United. In 1991, they suffered a 4–3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers.
Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008.
Scotland
Winning first of his caps in 1984, Malpas is the most recent part-time professional to have played for Scotland. He won 55 caps in total. In his 50th international appearance (away to Norway in June 1992) he was made captain to mark the occasion. He appeared for Scotland at the 1986 and 1990 World Cups and at Euro 1992.
Coaching and managerial career
After retiring as a player, Malpas assumed full-time coaching duties at Tannadice, having been acting as player/coach since 1991. He was part of the temporary management team following the dismissal of Alex Smith in October 2002, but left the club in January 2003.
He initially joined Motherwell as assistant manager to former coaching colleague Terry Butcher. Malpas became Motherwell manager in May 2006, following Butcher's departure to coach Sydney FC. He left the club in June 2007 after one season in charge, having taken the team from a comfortable mid-table position to one that narrowly avoided relegation. Malpas became caretaker manager of the Scotland under-21 team in August 2007, but missed out on the permanent position to Billy Stark.
In January 2008, Malpas became manager of Swindon Town after the takeover of the club by local businessman Andrew Fitton, replacing former Dundee United teammate Paul Sturrock. Malpas was sacked by chairman Andrew Fitton on 14 November 2008 after a poor run of results and shock exits in the FA Cup to Histon and in the Football League Trophy within a week. He joined Terry Butcher again as assistant, this time at SPL club Inverness Caledonian Thistle. In 2013, Malpas moved with Butcher to Hibernian, rejecting the chance to manage Inverness. Butcher and Malpas both left Hibernian in June 2014, after the club had been relegated from the Scottish Premiership.
Malpas became director of football at Raith Rovers on 26 December 2014. He left Raith Rovers on 22 May 2015 and was inducted to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in October 2015.
Malpas returned to Inverness Caledonian Thistle in April 2017, working for manager Richie Foran.
Managerial statistics
Honours
Club
Dundee United
Scottish League Premier Division: 1982–83
Scottish Cup: 1993–94
Runner-up 1984–85, 1986–87, 1987–88, 1990–91
Scottish League Cup runner-up: 1984–85, 1997–98
UEFA Cup runner-up: 1986–87
Scottish Challenge Cup runner-up: 1995–96
Individual
SFWA Footballer of the Year: 1991
Scottish FA International Roll of Honour: 1992
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductee: 2015
See also
List of footballers in Scotland by number of league appearances (500+)
List of one-club men in association football
List of Scotland national football team captains
References
External links
1962 births
1986 FIFA World Cup players
1990 FIFA World Cup players
Dundee United F.C. non-playing staff
Dundee United F.C. players
Hibernian F.C. non-playing staff
Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. non-playing staff
Living people
Motherwell F.C. managers
Motherwell F.C. non-playing staff
Scotland international footballers
Scotland under-21 international footballers
Scottish Football League players
Scottish football managers
Scottish footballers
Scottish Premier League managers
Scottish Premier League players
Footballers from Dunfermline
Swindon Town F.C. managers
English Football League managers
UEFA Euro 1992 players
Scotland national under-21 football team managers
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductees
Association football fullbacks
| true |
[
"This is an incomplete list of Filipino full-length films, both mainstream and independently produced, released in theaters and cinemas in 2014.\n\nTop ten grossing films\n\nNote\n\n Box Office Mojo, a reliable third party box office revenue tracker, does not track any revenues earned during any Metro Manila Film Festival editions. So the official figures by film entries during the festival are only estimates taken from any recent updates from credible and reliable sources such as a film's production outfit, or from any news agencies. Also, Metro Manila Development Authority (MMDA) did not release the official gross sales of each of the films. To verify the figures, see individual sources for the references.\n\nColor key\n\nFilms\n\nJanuary–March\n\nApril–June\n\nJuly–September\nColor key\n\nNote\n\n 1st Ko si 3rd was also a QCinema International Film Festival entry film.\n\nOctober–December\nColor key\n\nAwards\n\nLocal\nThe following first list shows the Best Picture winners at the four major film awards: FAMAS Awards, Gawad Urian Awards, Luna Awards and Star Awards; and at the three major film festivals: Metro Manila Film Festival, Cinemalaya and Cinema One Originals. The second list shows films with the most awards won from the three major film awards and a breakdown of their total number of awards per award ceremony.\n\nInternational\nThe following list shows Filipino films (released in 2014) which were nominated or won awards at international industry-based awards and FIAPF-accredited competitive film festivals.\n\nSee also\n 2014 in the Philippines\n List of 2014 box office number-one films in the Philippines\n\nReferences\n\nPhilippines",
"Sameep Ranaut is an Indian actor, best known for his child roles as young Harjeet Singh in Harjeeta and Gagan in Uda Aida. He also won Best Child Artist award at 66th National Film Awards for his debut role in Harjeeta.\n\nCareer \n\nRanaut made his acting debut with the film Harjeeta (2018). He did not give any auditions for the film in fact he was discovered by Sawan Rupowali playing hockey where she recorded Ranaut's audition clip.\n\nFilmography\n\nAwards and nominations \n\n Won Best Child Artist award at 66th National Film Awards for Harjeeta (2018)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nBest Child Artist National Film Award winners\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nIndian male film actors\n21st-century Indian male actors\n21st-century Indian male child actors"
] |
[
"Maurice Malpas",
"Dundee United",
"What was the Dundee United",
"He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career",
"What did he do for dundee united?",
"Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983.",
"Did he recieve any awards?",
"Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000."
] |
C_35f91d9908224f0e982ca37b9309ed5e_1
|
What other awards did he recieve?
| 4 |
What other awards did Maurice Malpas receive beside the SFWA Footballer of the Year Award in 1991?
|
Maurice Malpas
|
Malpas was born in Dunfermline Fife. and played youth football for Leven Royals. He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree, and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983-84 European Cup United reached the semi final. United made it to the 1986/87 UEFA Cup Final. En route they defeated Terry Venables' F.C. Barcelona side featuring Gary Lineker and Mark Hughes at home and away in the quarter finals. Kevin Gallacher scored the only goal in the first leg at home. Ian Redford delivered the free kick headed home by John Clark for a 2nd leg equaliser at Camp Nou. This prompted Lineker to prophetically say to one of the United players, 'this mob'll just chuck it.' Iain Ferguson then scored a second for United nodding in Paul Sturrock's cross to win 3-1 on aggregate. In the semi final they drew 0-0 at home to Borussia Monchengladbach. In the return leg in Germany they inflicted Borussia's first home defeat in Europe in 55 games going back to 1970. Ferguson put United ahead just before half time. Redford capped the United performance with a last minute goal to seal a 2-0 win. Billy Thomson was injured after five minutes of the final first leg diving at the feet of Lennart Nilsson and needed five stitches for a blow just behind his left ear. Some reports said Thomson almost lost his ear. Thomson though repelled attack after attack and was beaten only once when Stefan Pettersson scored. McLean described Thomson's performance as "magnificent". Despite Clark scoring in the final in the 1-1 second leg draw at Tannadice, United lost 2-1 on aggregate. United played in the Scottish Cup Final in 1987. Ferguson had a much disputed extra time goal disallowed. Five minutes later name sake Ian Ferguson scored the only goal of the game for a 1-0 St Mirren win. Gallagher had United ahead the year after when they lost 2-1 to Celtic. In 1991 Dave Bowman, John O'Neil and Darren Jackson scored in the 4-3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers. Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008. CANNOTANSWER
|
He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008.
|
Maurice Daniel Robert Malpas (born 3 August 1962) is a Scottish football player and coach. He signed for Dundee United in 1979 and spent his entire professional playing career with the club until his retirement in 2000. With him, United were Scottish champions in 1983 and Scottish Cup winners in 1994. European runs there included reaching the 1983–84 European Cup semi final and the 1987 UEFA Cup Final.
Malpas made his debut for the Scotland national team in 1984. He went on to gain 55 caps, making him a member of the Scotland national football team roll of honour. He played for Scotland at two World Cups and one UEFA European Championship final tournaments.
Malpas began a coaching career in 1991 whilst still a Dundee United player, continuing as a coach after his retirement until leaving the club in 2003. He joined Motherwell as assistant manager to Terry Butcher before becoming manager from 2006 until 2007. He coached the Scotland under-21 team on a temporary basis before another brief spell in club management with Swindon Town during 2008. More recently he has been assistant manager to Butcher at both Inverness Caledonian Thistle and Hibernian.
Playing career
Dundee United
Malpas was born in Dunfermline, Fife and played youth football for Leven Royals.
He signed for Dundee United in August 1979. His total of 830 competitive first team appearances is the second highest in the club's history. Malpas initially combined his football career with studying for an electrical engineering degree at Dundee College of Technology (now Abertay University), and didn't become a full-time professional until 1984. Despite this, he made his debut in for Dundee United in 1981 and won the Scottish Football League Premier Division title in 1983. In the subsequent 1983–84 European Cup, United reached the semi final.
United made it to the final of the 1986–87 UEFA Cup; en-route they defeated Terry Venables' FC Barcelona side home and away in the quarter-final, and inflicted a first home defeat on Borussia Mönchengladbach in 55 European games going back to 1970 in the semi-final. They lost 2–1 on aggregate to IFK Gothenburg in the final, the second leg of which was their 70th match of the season.
United and Malpas played in five Scottish Cup finals in nine years: in 1985 they took the lead but lost 2–1 to Celtic. In 1987 (played in between the two legs of the UEFA Cup final) they lost 1–0 St Mirren. In 1988 against Celtic, the pattern of 1985 was almost repeated but this time it was an even later goal which defeated United. In 1991, they suffered a 4–3 extra time defeat to Motherwell. Captain Malpas lifted the trophy when Craig Brewster scored the only goal in the 1994 Scottish Cup Final win against Rangers.
Malpas won the SFWA Footballer of the Year award in 1991. His long service was rewarded with two testimonial matches, in 1991 and 2000. He was inducted into the Dundee United Hall of Fame as one of its inaugural members in 2008.
Scotland
Winning first of his caps in 1984, Malpas is the most recent part-time professional to have played for Scotland. He won 55 caps in total. In his 50th international appearance (away to Norway in June 1992) he was made captain to mark the occasion. He appeared for Scotland at the 1986 and 1990 World Cups and at Euro 1992.
Coaching and managerial career
After retiring as a player, Malpas assumed full-time coaching duties at Tannadice, having been acting as player/coach since 1991. He was part of the temporary management team following the dismissal of Alex Smith in October 2002, but left the club in January 2003.
He initially joined Motherwell as assistant manager to former coaching colleague Terry Butcher. Malpas became Motherwell manager in May 2006, following Butcher's departure to coach Sydney FC. He left the club in June 2007 after one season in charge, having taken the team from a comfortable mid-table position to one that narrowly avoided relegation. Malpas became caretaker manager of the Scotland under-21 team in August 2007, but missed out on the permanent position to Billy Stark.
In January 2008, Malpas became manager of Swindon Town after the takeover of the club by local businessman Andrew Fitton, replacing former Dundee United teammate Paul Sturrock. Malpas was sacked by chairman Andrew Fitton on 14 November 2008 after a poor run of results and shock exits in the FA Cup to Histon and in the Football League Trophy within a week. He joined Terry Butcher again as assistant, this time at SPL club Inverness Caledonian Thistle. In 2013, Malpas moved with Butcher to Hibernian, rejecting the chance to manage Inverness. Butcher and Malpas both left Hibernian in June 2014, after the club had been relegated from the Scottish Premiership.
Malpas became director of football at Raith Rovers on 26 December 2014. He left Raith Rovers on 22 May 2015 and was inducted to the Scottish Football Hall of Fame in October 2015.
Malpas returned to Inverness Caledonian Thistle in April 2017, working for manager Richie Foran.
Managerial statistics
Honours
Club
Dundee United
Scottish League Premier Division: 1982–83
Scottish Cup: 1993–94
Runner-up 1984–85, 1986–87, 1987–88, 1990–91
Scottish League Cup runner-up: 1984–85, 1997–98
UEFA Cup runner-up: 1986–87
Scottish Challenge Cup runner-up: 1995–96
Individual
SFWA Footballer of the Year: 1991
Scottish FA International Roll of Honour: 1992
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductee: 2015
See also
List of footballers in Scotland by number of league appearances (500+)
List of one-club men in association football
List of Scotland national football team captains
References
External links
1962 births
1986 FIFA World Cup players
1990 FIFA World Cup players
Dundee United F.C. non-playing staff
Dundee United F.C. players
Hibernian F.C. non-playing staff
Inverness Caledonian Thistle F.C. non-playing staff
Living people
Motherwell F.C. managers
Motherwell F.C. non-playing staff
Scotland international footballers
Scotland under-21 international footballers
Scottish Football League players
Scottish football managers
Scottish footballers
Scottish Premier League managers
Scottish Premier League players
Footballers from Dunfermline
Swindon Town F.C. managers
English Football League managers
UEFA Euro 1992 players
Scotland national under-21 football team managers
Scottish Football Hall of Fame inductees
Association football fullbacks
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"The 1990 Brit Awards were the 10th edition of the biggest annual pop music awards in the United Kingdom. They are run by the British Phonographic Industry and took place on 18 February 1990. The ceremony was held at the Dominion Theatre in London for the first time, having previously been held at the Royal Albert Hall, and was hosted by Cathy McGowan.\n\nPerformances\nLisa Stansfield – \"All Around the World\"\nNeneh Cherry – \"Manchild\"\nNigel Kennedy – Vivaldi's Four Seasons\nVarious Artists with appearance by The Cookie Crew – \"The Brits 1990 (Dance Medley)\"\nPhil Collins – \"Another Day in Paradise\"\nSoul II Soul – What Is Soul II Soul\n\nWinners and nominees\n\nMultiple nominations and awards\nThe following artists received multiple awards and/or nominations. don't counting Outstanding Contribution to Music.\n\nNotable moments\n\nFreddie Mercury\nThe 1990 Brit Awards saw the final public appearance of Queen frontman Freddie Mercury. Queen appeared at the ceremony to receive the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. Mercury – who had been suffering from AIDS since 1987 but had not yet disclosed it to the public – did not make a speech, as Brian May did the talking on behalf of the other members, but his gaunt appearance was noticeable. He briefly thanked the public and wished them goodnight before Queen left the stage. Mercury died in November 1991 from complications resulting from AIDS.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n1990 Brit Awards at Brits.co.uk\n\nBrit Awards\n1990 in British music\nBrit Awards\nBrit Awards\nBrit",
"Ricky Gervais ( ; born 25 June 1961) is an English comedian, actor, writer, producer, and director. He is best known for co-creating, writing, and acting in the British television series The Office (2001–2003). He has won seven BAFTA Awards, five British Comedy Awards, two Primetime Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and the Rose d'Or twice (2006 and 2019), as well as a Screen Actors Guild Award nomination. In 2007, he was placed at No. 11 on Channel 4's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups and at No. 3 on the updated 2010 list. In 2010, he was named on the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. In 2002 he was nominated to be Britain's Funniest Man but did not win the award, he did however beat some gangsters up in a pub when an old man was being hassled, against the odds.\n\nMajor awards\n\nPrimetime Emmy Awards\n\nGolden Globe Awards\n\nBAFTA Television Awards\n\nScreen Actors Guild Awards\n\nWriters Guild of America Awards\n\nProducers Guild of America Awards\n\nOther awards\n\nBritannia Awards\n\nBritish Comedy Guide Awards\n\nBritish Comedy Awards\n\nBroadcasting Press Guild Awards\n\nEvening Standard British Film Awards\n\nSatellite Award\n\nTelevision Critics Association Awards\n\nReferences \n\nLists of awards received by actor"
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"Richard III of England",
"In culture"
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What things did Richard III of England like to do?
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What things did Richard III of England like to do?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
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"Richard of England may refer to:\n\nRichard I of England (1157–1199), King of England from 1189\nRichard II of England (1367–1400), King of England from 1377 to 1399\nRichard III of England (1452–1485), King of England from 1483",
"Dominic Mancini () was an Italian religious who visited England in 1482–3. He witnessed the events leading up to Richard III being offered the English crown. He left in 1483 and wrote a report of what he had witnessed. He called it: De Occupatione Regni Anglie per Riccardum Tercium ('The Occupation of the Throne of England by Richard III'). The account is a major source of information about the period, but it sat unread in a French library in Lille until rediscovered in 1934.\n\nMancini's report was written for Angelo Cato, Archbishop of Vienne, one of the counsellors of King Louis XI of France and also his doctor and astrologer. Although some historians think Mancini arrived in England at the end of 1482, others believe he got there just before Edward IV died (9 April 1483). He returned to France sometime between the coronation of Richard III on 6 July 1483 – before the princes disappeared – and the delivery of his report in December the same year.\n\nIt is not clear how much English Mancini understood, and much of what was happening in England while he was there had to be translated to him. A possible source was Dr John Argentine, an opponent of Richard who became a member of Henry VII's court and who spoke Italian. Argentine was the doctor who was treating the elder prince, Edward V, while he was in the Tower and is one of the last persons known to have seen the two princes alive.\n\nMancini's report was lost for centuries but was discovered in the Municipal Library in Lille, France, in 1934. As far as is known, Mancini never met King Richard, but he repeated the gossip and rumours that were current about the activities of the royal family; these included the \"suspicion\" that Richard's nephews had been done away with. Guillaume de Rochefort, Lord Chancellor of France, repeated the rumour in the Estates-General in Tours in January 1484, adding that Richard III had \"massacred\" the princes and then been given the crown \"by the will of the people\"; he may have obtained his information from Mancini's report. This intelligence was used as an excuse by the French for assisting Henry's invasion.\n\nWorks\n Mancini, Dominic, The Usurpation of Richard the Third, (C.A.J. Armstrong, translator), Sutton Publishing (1984) \n Mancini, Dominic. Domenico Mancini de occupatione regni Anglie, (Introduction, historical notes and translated by Annette Carson), Imprimis Imprimatur (2021) ISBN 978-0-9576840-6-5\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\nCharles Ross, Richard III, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA (1981) \nAlison Weir, The Princes in the Tower, Ballantine (1993) \n\n15th-century Italian Christian monks\n15th century in England\nYear of birth unknown\nYear of death unknown\nRichard III of England\nItalian expatriates in England\nItalian memoirists"
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"Richard III of England",
"In culture",
"What things did Richard III of England like to do?",
"a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way."
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What did he do to get his way?
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What did Richard III of England do to get his way?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
1452 births
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"A Man's Gotta Do is a 2004 Australian award winning film from Australian director, Chris Kennedy. The film stars John Howard.\n\nTagline \nMost men hold their head high, put their backs to the wall and do what they must do to give their family what they want.\n\nPlot \n\nIn A Man's Gotta Do, Eddy (John Howard), lives with his wife, Yvonne (Rebecca Frith), and their daughter, Chantelle (Alyssa McClelland), in a new suburb in the Illawarra part, south of Sydney.\n\nEddy is a fisherman by day, but by night he works as a standover man, literally a toe-cutter. Dominic, (Gyton Grantley), is his new offsider.\n\nChantelle is upset because her fiancé, Rudi, a Russian air conditioning specialist, has disappeared. Did her Dad have something to do with it?\n\nThe frustrated Yvonne begins flirting with Paul, the plumber, (Rohan Nicol). Eddy encourages Dominic to read his daughter's diary thinking that's the way to get a better understanding of her needs.\n\nReception\n\nReviews \nThe film received Mixed reviews. Australian TV show At the Movies gave it three and a half stars. It holds a 40 metascore, with the Village voice giving it 30/100\n\nAwards \nThe film wasn't nominated for many awards but did win the only award it was nominated for, a Golden Zenith for the Best film from Oceania at the Montreal Film Festival.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nAustralian films\nAustralian comedy films\n2004 films\n2004 comedy films",
"The House Next Door is a stand-alone book that has three fictional stories in it.\n\nPlot\nThis book has three short stories in it. James Patterson writes each of the stories with one of the coauthors of the book.\n\nThe first story, \"The House Next Door\" (written by Patterson and Susan DiLallo), is about a family living next to a derelict house that has just been occupied by a mysterious man and his son. As the family and the neighbors get to know the house's new occupants, what they learn is truly frightening.\n\n\"The Killer's Wife,\" written by Patterson and Max DiLallo, is about a detective's quest to find what has happened to four girls who have gone missing. To do this he decides the only way to find them is to get on the good side of the wife of the man suspected of abducting them. He is knows he is walking a fine line and his plan could go all wrong.\n\n\"We.Are.Not.Alone.\" is written by Patterson and Tim Arnold. It's about a scientist who has been looking for alien life for years and who is no longer taken seriously. He one day gets a message from space proving intelligent aliens exist. While that's what he wanted, he quickly finds others suddenly want to seize him and whisk him away, so he runs for his life.\n\nReviews\nThe House Next Door did not immediately make The New York Times best sellers list. It did so as a mass market monthly book for the month of December 2019.\n\nReferences\n\n2019 short story collections"
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"Richard III of England",
"In culture",
"What things did Richard III of England like to do?",
"a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.",
"What did he do to get his way?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_2e1c3e7adf034c769baeb44f09ba2694_1
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How did he use people?
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How did Richard III of England use people?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them.
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
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"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",
"The Way We Talk Now: Commentaries on Language and Culture from NPR's Fresh Air is a collection of essays by Geoffrey Nunberg about the effect of language on contemporary culture. Most of the essays are based on segments from the NPR radio program Fresh Air. Nunberg looks at modern culture through the lens of language, using his expertise as a linguist to highlight the subtle ways in which language influences society. The essays are organized by subject.\n\nThe Passing Scene \nIn this section Nunberg focuses on language as a sign of generational change. Beginning with a personal anecdote of his struggles with his wife to find an appropriate name for their new baby daughter, he goes on to discuss a variety of topics, such as the increasing influence of conversational tics like \"you know,\" the legacy of Yiddish words in American English, the question of personal favorite words, the effect that television shows have on the language, and the use of wordplay in country music.\n\nWord Histories \nNunberg examines how the meaning of particular words has changed, indicating shifts in societal values. He talks about how slang comes from a different sector of society than it once did, how words with obscure origins mysteriously become obsolete, how the word suburb has signified different social conditions through the ages, how portmanteau words have been on the increase in modern times, and how sarcasm has gradually displaced irony.\n\nPolitics of the English Language \nNunberg discusses how people's choice of words reflects recent political history, examining the difference between force and violence, the use of -i as a suffix for Middle Eastern countries, the phrase political correctness, the Ebonics controversy, and the debate over the word \"Jew.\"\n\nThe Two R's \nNunberg examines the issue of traditional grammar vs. shifting usages, taking a relatively liberal perspective on English as an evolving tongue. He talks about the anachronistic nature of spelling bees; the problems in how parts of speech are traditionally taught; the curious survival of the split infinitive rule; the pros and cons of English speakers' tendency to turn nouns into verbs; and the ambiguous meaning of the word \"literacy.\"\n\nTechnical Terms \nNunberg examines the shifting language of technology, such as words like \"virtual\" and \"hacker,\" and he discusses other technology language issues such as computer grammar checkers and emoticons.\n\nBusiness Talk \nNunberg discusses the language of the business world, including the synonyms for firing, brand names, and the use of the word \"issue\" as a euphemism for \"problem.\"\n\nValediction \nThe final section contains a whimsical poem reflecting on the issues discussed in the book.\n\n2001 books\nHoughton Mifflin books"
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[
"Richard III of England",
"In culture",
"What things did Richard III of England like to do?",
"a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.",
"What did he do to get his way?",
"I don't know.",
"How did he use people?",
") have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them."
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C_2e1c3e7adf034c769baeb44f09ba2694_1
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Who did he murder?
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Who did Richard III of England murder?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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death of the Princes.
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
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"Melissa Nordell was a Swedish fashion model, who was murdered when she was 22 years old. Her murder, by a disgruntled boyfriend, is said to have inspired Stieg Larsson to write the Millennium novels.\n\nDuring her post-mortem, signs were found she had been the target of violence on other occasions. Her ex-boyfriend confessed to the murder. He admitted buying a stun gun, and remembered using it on her, but claimed he did not remember strangling her. He admitted weighting her body, prior to throwing it off a bridge. Her ex-boyfriend's motive is routinely described as rage over her decision to leave him.\n\nA few months after Nordell's murder, a Muslim woman, living in Sweden, Fadime Sahindal, was murdered by her father. The two murders are regularly compared. Some commentators question why only Sahindal's murder should be characterized as an \"honour killing\". In May 2015 Sweden's TV4 broadcast a documentary about Nordell's murder.\n\nReferences \n\nSwedish female models\nSwedish murder victims\n1970s births\n2001 deaths\nDeaths by strangulation",
"People v. Bland, 28 Cal. 4th 313 (2002), is a United States criminal case interpreting attempted murder. The defendant fired multiple shots into a car with three people, killing the driver, and injuring the other two. The evidence showed he intended to kill the driver, but did not specifically intend to kill the others. The court wrote \"The crime of attempt sanctions what the person intended to do but did not accomplish, not unintended and unaccomplished potential consequences.\" However, the court found a person could concurrently intend to kill more than just the person targeted, both the target and others in the \"kill zone\" of the shots, such as when a person sets off a bomb targeting a person who is surrounded by others, who would be guilty of murder of everyone killed by the blast. \n\nThe court distinguished murder and attempted murder in that \"transferred intent does not apply to attempted murder\", in that if a defendant intends to kill one person but instead kills another by the act, then the defendant is guilt of murder because the intent to kill transfers. But if the defendant attempts to kill a target and fails to kill anyone in the kill zone, the intent to kill the target does not transfer to others in the kill zone as an attempted murder. \n\nThe court further distinguishes that if a defendant intends to kill a target and also kills others in the kill zone, then they are guilty of the murder of each person killed, i.e., is guilty of multiple counts of murder. However, if the defendant by the same act fails to kill anyone, defendant is only guilty of a single count of attempted murder by the act.\n\nReferences\n\n2002 in United States case law\nLaw articles needing an infobox"
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"Richard III of England",
"In culture",
"What things did Richard III of England like to do?",
"a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.",
"What did he do to get his way?",
"I don't know.",
"How did he use people?",
") have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them.",
"Who did he murder?",
"death of the Princes."
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Why did he murder them?
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Why did Richard III of England murder the princes?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
1452 births
1485 deaths
15th-century English monarchs
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Dukes of Gloucester
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"Why Did You Kill Me? is a 2021 American documentary film directed and produced by Fredrick Munk. The film follows Belinda Lane as she tracks down those involved in the murder of Crystal Theobald, her daughter, using MySpace.\n\nIt was released on April 14, 2021, by Netflix.\n\nPlot\nBelinda Lane tracks down those involved in the murder of Crystal Theobald, her daughter, using MySpace.\n\nRelease\nThe film was released on April 14, 2021, by Netflix.\n\nReception\nWhy Did You Kill Me? holds a 63% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 8 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.50/10.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\n2021 films\n2021 documentary films\nAmerican films\nAmerican documentary films\nDocumentary films about gangs in the United States\nDocumentary films about death\nNetflix original documentary films",
"Benjamin Bennett (1904–1985) was a well known South African crime writer. He worked as a journalist with the Cape Argus newspaper from 1925 to 1975, as a crime reporter, and subsequently as news editor and finally editor of Argus Action. He was born in Kimberley, South Africa, and was educated at Kimberley Boys' High School.\n\nBennett’s prodigious output of books reflects a close involvement, as crime reporter, both at the crime scene and in the courtroom, where his professional life regularly took him, pen and notebook in hand. It is said that, for his insight, he was even consulted by the police for the solving of certain complex cases.\nHe is credited with having posed the most plausible scenarios for enduring murder mysteries, such as that of Bubbles Schroeder.\n\nBennett’s books include:\n\n Down Africa's Skyways (1932)\n Up For Murder (1934) with François Pierre Rousseau\n Famous South African Murders (1938)\n Hitler Over Africa (1939)\n Too Late For Tears (1948)\n The Clues Condemn (1949)\n The Evil That Men Do (1950)\n Murder Is My Business (1951)\n Why Did They Do It? (1953)\n And Your Verdict? (1954)\n Destiny Comes Too Soon (1955)\n Freedom Or The Gallows (1956)\n This Was A Man (1958)\n Genius For the Defence (1959)\n Murder Will Speak (1962)\n Why Women Kill (1965)\n Why Men Kill (1965)\n The Amazing Case of the Baron von Schauroth (1966)\n The Cohen Case (1971)\n They Crossed My Path (1972)\n Some Don't Hang (1973)\n The Noose Tightens (1974)\n Was Justice Done? The Scissors Murder (1975)\n\nHe also ghost-wrote Looking At My Heart (1968), the biography of Philip Blaiberg.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Benjamin Bennett – South Africa's Greatest True Crime Reporter/Author by Doug Nicholson\n THE MYSTIFYING DEATH OF BUBBLES SCHROEDER,1949, by Rob Marsh\n\nPeople from Kimberley, Northern Cape\n1904 births\n1985 deaths\nSouth African journalists\n20th-century South African male writers\n20th-century journalists"
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[
"Richard III of England",
"In culture",
"What things did Richard III of England like to do?",
"a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way.",
"What did he do to get his way?",
"I don't know.",
"How did he use people?",
") have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them.",
"Who did he murder?",
"death of the Princes.",
"Why did he murder them?",
"I don't know."
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What else did he do to get his way?
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Besides murdering the princes, What else did Richard III of England do to get his way?
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Richard III of England
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Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" adding that he is "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king. Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal of Richard III is given in The Founding, the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles. One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions. CANNOTANSWER
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Richard III (2 October 145222 August 1485) was King of England and Lord of Ireland from 26 June 1483 until his death in 1485. He was the last king of the House of York and the last of the Plantagenet dynasty. His defeat and death at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last decisive battle of the Wars of the Roses, marked the end of the Middle Ages in England. He is the protagonist of Richard III, one of William Shakespeare's history/tragedy plays.
Richard was created Duke of Gloucester in 1461 after the accession of his brother King Edward IV. In 1472, he married Anne Neville, daughter of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick. He governed northern England during Edward's reign, and played a role in the invasion of Scotland in 1482. When Edward IV died in April 1483, Richard was named Lord Protector of the realm for Edward's eldest son and successor, the 12-year-old Edward V. Arrangements were made for Edward V's coronation on 22 June 1483. Before the king could be crowned, the marriage of his parents was declared bigamous and therefore invalid. Now officially illegitimate, their children were barred from inheriting the throne. On 25 June, an assembly of lords and commoners endorsed a declaration to this effect, and proclaimed Richard as the rightful king. He was crowned on 6 July 1483. Edward and his younger brother Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, called the "Princes in the Tower", were not seen in public after August, and accusations circulated that they had been murdered on King Richard's orders, under the Tudor rule a few years later.
There were two major rebellions against Richard during his reign. In October 1483, an unsuccessful revolt was led by staunch allies of Edward IV and Richard's former ally, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham. Then, in August 1485, Henry Tudor and his uncle, Jasper Tudor, landed in southern Wales with a contingent of French troops, and marched through Pembrokeshire, recruiting soldiers. Henry's forces defeated Richard's army near the Leicestershire town of Market Bosworth. Richard was slain, making him the last English king to die in battle. Henry Tudor then ascended the throne as Henry VII.
Richard's corpse was taken to the nearby town of Leicester and buried without ceremony. His original tomb monument is believed to have been removed during the English Reformation, and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. In 2012, an archaeological excavation was commissioned by the Richard III Society on the site previously occupied by Grey Friars Priory. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton found in the excavation as that of Richard III as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of his sister Anne. He was reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March 2015.
Early life
Richard was born on 2 October 1452, at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire, the eleventh of the twelve children of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville, and the youngest to survive infancy. His childhood coincided with the beginning of what has traditionally been labelled the 'Wars of the Roses', a period of political instability and periodic open civil war in England during the second half of the fifteenth century, between the Yorkists, who supported Richard's father (a potential claimant to the throne of King Henry VI from birth), and opposed the regime of Henry VI and his wife, Margaret of Anjou, and the Lancastrians, who were loyal to the crown. In 1459, his father and the Yorkists were forced to flee England, whereupon Richard and his older brother George were placed in the custody of their aunt Anne Neville, Duchess of Buckingham, and possibly of Cardinal Thomas Bourchier, Archbishop of Canterbury.
When their father and elder brother Edmund, Earl of Rutland, were killed at the Battle of Wakefield on 30 December 1460, Richard and George were sent by their mother to the Low Countries. They returned to England following the defeat of the Lancastrians at the Battle of Towton. They participated in the coronation of their eldest brother as King Edward IV on 28 June 1461, when Richard was named Duke of Gloucester and made both a Knight of the Garter and a Knight of the Bath. Edward appointed him the sole Commissioner of Array for the Western Counties in 1464 when he was 11. By the age of 17, he had an independent command.
Richard spent several years during his childhood at Middleham Castle in Wensleydale, Yorkshire, under the tutelage of his cousin Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, later known as 'the Kingmaker' because of his role in the Wars of the Roses. Warwick supervised Richard's training as a knight; in the autumn of 1465, Edward IV granted Warwick £1000 for the expenses of his younger brother's tutelage. With some interruptions, Richard stayed at Middleham either from late 1461 until early 1465, when he was 12 or from 1465 until his coming of age in 1468, when he turned 16. While at Warwick's estate, it is likely that he met both Francis Lovell, who would be his firm supporter later in his life, and Warwick's younger daughter, his future wife Anne Neville.
It is possible that even at this early stage Warwick was considering the king's brothers as strategic matches for his daughters, Isabel and Anne: young aristocrats were often sent to be raised in the households of their intended future partners, as had been the case for the young dukes' father, Richard of York. As the relationship between the king and Warwick became strained, Edward IV opposed the match. During Warwick's lifetime, George was the only royal brother to marry one of his daughters, the elder, Isabel, on 12 July 1469, without the king's permission. George joined his father-in-law's revolt against the king, while Richard remained loyal to Edward, even though he was rumoured to have been sleeping with Anne.
Richard and Edward were forced to flee to Burgundy in October 1470 after Warwick defected to the side of the former Lancastrian queen Margaret of Anjou. In 1468, Richard's sister Margaret had married Charles the Bold, the Duke of Burgundy, and the brothers could expect a welcome there. Edward was restored to the throne in the spring of 1471, following the battles of Barnet and Tewkesbury, in both of which the 18-year-old Richard played a crucial role.
During his adolescence, and due to a cause that is unknown, Richard developed a sideways curvature of the spine (Scoliosis). In 2014, after the discovery of Richard's remains, the osteoarchaeologist Dr. Jo Appleby, of Leicester University's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, imaged the spinal column, and reconstructed a model using 3D printing, and concluded that though the spinal scoliosis looked dramatic, it probably did not cause any major physical deformity that could not be disguised by clothing.
Marriage and family relationships
Following a decisive Yorkist victory over the Lancastrians at the Battle of Tewkesbury, Richard married Anne Neville on 12 July 1472. By the end of 1470 Anne had previously been wedded to Edward of Westminster, only son of Henry VI, to seal her father's allegiance to the Lancastrian party. Edward died at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471, while Warwick had died at the Battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. Richard's marriage plans brought him into conflict with his brother George. John Paston's letter of 17 February 1472 makes it clear that George was not happy about the marriage but grudgingly accepted it on the basis that "he may well have my Lady his sister-in-law, but they shall part no livelihood". The reason was the inheritance Anne shared with her elder sister Isabel, whom George had married in 1469. It was not only the earldom that was at stake; Richard Neville had inherited it as a result of his marriage to Anne Beauchamp, 16th Countess of Warwick. The Countess, who was still alive, was technically the owner of the substantial Beauchamp estates, her father having left no male heirs.
The Croyland Chronicle records that Richard agreed to a prenuptial contract in the following terms: "the marriage of the Duke of Gloucester with Anne before-named was to take place, and he was to have such and so much of the earl's lands as should be agreed upon between them through the mediation of arbitrators; while all the rest were to remain in the possession of the Duke of Clarence". The date of Paston's letter suggests the marriage was still being negotiated in February 1472. In order to win George's final consent to the marriage, Richard renounced most of the Earl of Warwick's land and property including the earldoms of Warwick (which the Kingmaker had held in his wife's right) and Salisbury and surrendered to George the office of Great Chamberlain of England. Richard retained Neville's forfeit estates he had already been granted in the summer of 1471: Penrith, Sheriff Hutton and Middleham, where he later established his marital household.
The requisite papal dispensation was obtained dated 22 April 1472. Michael Hicks has suggested that the terms of the dispensation deliberately understated the degrees of consanguinity between the couple, and the marriage was therefore illegal on the ground of first degree consanguinity following George's marriage to Anne's sister Isabel. There would have been first-degree consanguinity if Richard had sought to marry Isabel (in case of widowhood) after she had married his brother George, but no such consanguinity applied for Anne and Richard. Richard's marriage to Anne was never declared null, and it was public to everyone including secular and canon lawyers for 13 years.
In June 1473, Richard persuaded his mother-in-law to leave the sanctuary and come to live under his protection at Middleham. Later in the year, under the terms of the 1473 Act of Resumption, George lost some of the property he held under royal grant and made no secret of his displeasure. John Paston's letter of November 1473 says that King Edward planned to put both his younger brothers in their place by acting as "a stifler atween them". Early in 1474, Parliament assembled and Edward attempted to reconcile his brothers by stating that both men, and their wives, would enjoy the Warwick inheritance just as if the Countess of Warwick "was naturally dead". The doubts cast by George on the validity of Richard and Anne's marriage were addressed by a clause protecting their rights in the event they were divorced (i.e. of their marriage being declared null and void by the Church) and then legally remarried to each other, and also protected Richard's rights while waiting for such a valid second marriage with Anne. The following year, Richard was rewarded with all the Neville lands in the north of England, at the expense of Anne's cousin, George Neville, 1st Duke of Bedford. From this point, George seems to have fallen steadily out of King Edward's favour, his discontent coming to a head in 1477 when, following Isabel's death, he was denied the opportunity to marry Mary of Burgundy, the stepdaughter of his sister Margaret, even though Margaret approved the proposed match. There is no evidence of Richard's involvement in George's subsequent conviction and execution on a charge of treason.
Reign of Edward IV
Estates and titles
Richard was granted the Duchy of Gloucester on 1 November 1461, and on 12 August the next year was awarded large estates in northern England, including the lordships of Richmond in Yorkshire, and Pembroke in Wales. He gained the forfeited lands of the Lancastrian John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford, in East Anglia. In 1462, on his birthday, he was made Constable of Gloucester and Corfe Castles and Admiral of England, Ireland and Aquitaine and appointed Governor of the North, becoming the richest and most powerful noble in England. On 17 October 1469, he was made Constable of England. In November, he replaced William Hastings, 1st Baron Hastings, as Chief Justice of North Wales. The following year, he was appointed Chief Steward and Chamberlain of Wales. On 18 May 1471, Richard was named Great Chamberlain and Lord High Admiral of England. Other positions followed: High Sheriff of Cumberland for life, Lieutenant of the North and Commander-in-Chief against the Scots and hereditary Warden of the West March. Two months later, on 14 July, he gained the Lordships of the strongholds Sheriff Hutton and Middleham in Yorkshire and Penrith in Cumberland, which had belonged to Warwick the Kingmaker. It is possible that the grant of Middleham seconded Richard's personal wishes.
Exile and return
During the latter part of Edward IV's reign, Richard demonstrated his loyalty to the king, in contrast to their brother George who had allied himself with the Earl of Warwick when the latter rebelled towards the end of the 1460s. Following Warwick's 1470 rebellion, before which he had made peace with Margaret of Anjou and promised the restoration of Henry VI to the English throne, Richard, the Baron Hastings and Anthony Woodville, 2nd Earl Rivers, escaped capture at Doncaster by Warwick's brother, John Neville, 1st Marquess of Montagu. On 2 October they sailed from King's Lynn in two ships; Edward landed at Marsdiep and Richard at Zeeland. It was said that, having left England in such haste as to possess almost nothing, Edward was forced to pay their passage with his fur cloak; certainly, Richard borrowed three pounds from Zeeland's town bailiff. They were attainted by Warwick's only Parliament on 26 November. They resided in Bruges with Louis de Gruthuse, who had been the Burgundian Ambassador to Edward's court, but it was not until Louis XI of France declared war on Burgundy that Charles, Duke of Burgundy, assisted their return, providing, along with the Hanseatic merchants, £20,000, 36 ships and 1200 men. They departed Flushing for England on 11 March 1471. Warwick's arrest of local sympathisers prevented them from landing in Yorkist East Anglia and on 14 March, after being separated in a storm, their ships ran ashore at Holderness. The town of Hull refused Edward entry. He gained entry to York by using the same claim as Henry of Bolingbroke had before deposing Richard II in 1399; that is, that he was merely reclaiming the Dukedom of York rather than the crown. It was in Edward's attempt to regain his throne that Richard began to demonstrate his skill as a military commander.
1471 military campaign
Once Edward had regained the support of his brother George, he mounted a swift and decisive campaign to regain the crown through combat; it is believed that Richard was his principal lieutenant as some of the king's earliest support came from members of Richard's affinity, including Sir James Harrington and Sir William Parr, who brought 600 men-at-arms to them at Doncaster. Richard may have led the vanguard at the Battle of Barnet, in his first command, on 14 April 1471, where he outflanked the wing of Henry Holland, 3rd Duke of Exeter, although the degree to which his command was fundamental may have been exaggerated. That Richard's personal household sustained losses indicates he was in the thick of the fighting. A contemporary source is clear about his holding the vanguard for Edward at Tewkesbury, deployed against the Lancastrian vanguard under Edmund Beaufort, 4th Duke of Somerset, on 4 May 1471, and his role two days later, as Constable of England, sitting alongside John Howard as Earl Marshal, in the trial and sentencing of leading Lancastrians captured after the battle.
1475 invasion of France
At least in part resentful of King Louis XI's previous support of his Lancastrian opponents, and possibly in support of his brother-in-law Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, Edward went to parliament in October 1472 for funding a military campaign, and eventually landed in Calais on 4 July 1475. Richard's was the largest private contingent of his army. Although well known to have publicly been against the eventual treaty signed with Louis XI at Picquigny (and absent from the negotiations, in which one of his rank would have been expected to take a leading role), he acted as Edward's witness when the king instructed his delegates to the French court, and received 'some very fine presents' from Louis on a visit to the French king at Amiens. In refusing other gifts, which included 'pensions' in the guise of 'tribute', he was joined only by Cardinal Bourchier. He supposedly disapproved of Edward's policy of personally benefiting—politically and financially—from a campaign paid for out of a parliamentary grant, and hence out of public funds. Any military prowess was therefore not to be revealed further until the last years of Edward's reign.
The North, and the Council in the North
Richard was the dominant magnate in the north of England until Edward IV's death. There, and especially in the city of York, he was highly regarded; although it has been questioned whether this view was reciprocated by Richard. Edward IV delegated significant authority to Richard in the region. Kendall and later historians have suggested that this was with the intention of making Richard the Lord of the North; Peter Booth, however, has argued that "instead of allowing his brother Richard carte blanche, [Edward] restricted his influence by using his own agent, Sir William Parr." Following Richard's accession to the throne, he first established the Council of the North and made his nephew John de la Pole, 1st Earl of Lincoln, president and formally institutionalised this body as an offshoot of the royal Council; all its letters and judgements were issued on behalf of the king and in his name. The council had a budget of 2000 marks per annum and had issued "Regulations" by July of that year: councillors to act impartially and declare vested interests, and to meet at least every three months. Its main focus of operations was Yorkshire and the north-east, and its primary responsibilities were land disputes, keeping of the king's peace, and punishing lawbreakers.
War with Scotland
Richard's increasing role in the north from the mid-1470s to some extent explains his withdrawal from the royal court. He had been Warden of the West March on the Scottish border since 10 September 1470, and again from May 1471; he used Penrith as a base while 'taking effectual measures' against the Scots, and 'enjoyed the revenues of the estates' of the Forest of Cumberland while doing so. It was at the same time that the Duke of Gloucester was appointed sheriff of Cumberland five consecutive years, being described as 'of Penrith Castle' in 1478. By 1480, war with Scotland was looming; on 12 May that year he was appointed Lieutenant-General of the North (a position created for the occasion) as fears of a Scottish invasion grew. Louis XI of France had attempted to negotiate a military alliance with Scotland (in the tradition of the "Auld Alliance"), with the aim of attacking England, according to a contemporary French chronicler. Richard had the authority to summon the Border Levies and issue Commissions of Array to repel the Border raids. Together with the Earl of Northumberland, he launched counter-raids, and when the king and council formally declared war in November 1480, he was granted £10,000 for wages. The king failed to arrive to lead the English army and the result was intermittent skirmishing until early 1482. Richard witnessed the treaty with Alexander, Duke of Albany, brother of King James III of Scotland. Northumberland, Stanley, Dorset, Sir Edward Woodville, and Richard with approximately 20,000 men took the town of Berwick almost immediately. The castle held until 24 August 1482, when Richard recaptured Berwick-upon-Tweed from the Kingdom of Scotland. Although it is debatable whether the English victory was due more to internal Scottish divisions rather than any outstanding military prowess by Richard, it was the last time that the Royal Burgh of Berwick changed hands between the two realms.
Lord Protector
On the death of Edward IV on 9 April 1483, his 12-year-old son, Edward V, succeeded him. Richard was named Lord Protector of the Realm and at Baron Hastings' urging, Richard assumed his role and left his base in Yorkshire for London. On 29 April, as previously agreed, Richard and his cousin, Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, met Queen Elizabeth's brother, Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, at Northampton. At the queen's request, Earl Rivers was escorting the young king to London with an armed escort of 2000 men, while Richard and Buckingham's joint escort was 600 men. Edward V himself had been sent further south to Stony Stratford. At first convivial, Richard had Earl Rivers, his nephew Richard Grey and his associate, Thomas Vaughan, arrested. They were taken to Pontefract Castle, where they were executed on 25 June on the charge of treason against the Lord Protector after appearing before a tribunal led by Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. Rivers had appointed Richard as executor of his will.
After having Rivers arrested, Richard and Buckingham moved to Stony Stratford, where Richard informed Edward V of a plot aimed at denying him his role as protector and whose perpetrators had been dealt with. He proceeded to escort the king to London. They entered the city on 4 May, displaying the carriages of weapons Rivers had taken with his 2000-man army. Richard first accommodated Edward in the Bishop's apartments; then, on Buckingham's suggestion, the king was moved to the royal apartments of the Tower of London, where kings customarily awaited their coronation. Within the year 1483, Richard had moved himself to the grandeur of Crosby Hall, London, then in Bishopsgate in the City of London. Robert Fabyan, in his 'The new chronicles of England and of France', writes that "the Duke caused the King (Edward V) to be removed unto the Tower and his broder with hym, and the Duke lodged himselfe in Crosbyes Place in Bisshoppesgate Strete." In Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, he accounts that "little by little all folke withdrew from the Tower, and drew unto Crosbies in Bishops gates Street, where the Protector kept his houshold. The Protector had the resort; the King in maner desolate."
On hearing the news of her brother's 30 April arrest, the dowager queen fled to sanctuary in Westminster Abbey. Joining her were her son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset; her five daughters; and her youngest son, Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. On 10/11 June, Richard wrote to Ralph, Lord Neville, the City of York and others asking for their support against "the Queen, her blood adherents and affinity," whom he suspected of plotting his murder. At a council meeting on Friday 13 June at the Tower of London, Richard accused Hastings and others of having conspired against him with the Woodvilles and accusing Jane Shore, lover to both Hastings and Thomas Grey, of acting as a go-between. According to Thomas More, Hastings was taken out of the council chambers and summarily executed in the courtyard, while others, like Lord Thomas Stanley and John Morton, Bishop of Ely, were arrested. Hastings was not attainted and Richard sealed an indenture that placed Hastings' widow, Katherine, directly under his own protection. Bishop Morton was released into the custody of Buckingham. On 16 June, the dowager queen agreed to hand over the Duke of York to the Archbishop of Canterbury so that he might attend his brother Edward's coronation, still planned for 22 June.
King of England
A clergyman (Bishop Robert Stillington) is said to have informed Richard that Edward IV's marriage to Elizabeth Woodville was invalid because of Edward's earlier union with Eleanor Butler, making Edward V and his siblings illegitimate. The identity of the informant, known only through the memoirs of French diplomat Philippe de Commines, was Robert Stillington, the Bishop of Bath and Wells. On Sunday 22 June, a sermon was preached outside Old St. Paul's Cathedral by Ralph Shaa, declaring Edward IV's children bastards and Richard the rightful king. Shortly after, the citizens of London, both nobles and commons, convened and drew up a petition asking Richard to assume the throne. He accepted on 26 June and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 6 July. His title to the throne was confirmed by Parliament in January 1484 by the document Titulus Regius.
The princes, who were still lodged in the royal residence of the Tower of London at the time of Richard's coronation, disappeared from sight after the summer of 1483. Although after his death Richard III was accused of having Edward and his brother killed, notably by More and in Shakespeare's play, the facts surrounding their disappearance remain unknown. Other culprits have been suggested, including Buckingham and even Henry VII, although Richard remains a suspect.
After the coronation ceremony, Richard and Anne set out on a royal progress to meet their subjects. During this journey through the country, the king and queen endowed King's College and Queens' College at Cambridge University, and made grants to the church. Still feeling a strong bond with his northern estates, Richard later planned the establishment of a large chantry chapel in York Minster with over 100 priests. He also founded the College of Arms.
Buckingham's rebellion of 1483
In 1483, a conspiracy arose among a number of disaffected gentry, many of whom had been supporters of Edward IV and the "whole Yorkist establishment". The conspiracy was nominally led by Richard's former ally, the Duke of Buckingham, although it had begun as a Woodville-Beaufort conspiracy (being "well underway" by the time of the Duke's involvement). Indeed, Davies has suggested that it was "only the subsequent parliamentary attainder that placed Buckingham at the centre of events", in order to blame a single disaffected magnate motivated by greed, rather than "the embarrassing truth" that those opposing Richard were actually "overwhelmingly Edwardian loyalists". It is possible that they planned to depose Richard III and place Edward V back on the throne, and that when rumours arose that Edward and his brother were dead, Buckingham proposed that Henry Tudor should return from exile, take the throne and marry Elizabeth, eldest daughter of Edward IV. However, it has also been pointed out that as this narrative stems from Richard's own parliament of 1484, it should probably be treated "with caution". For his part, Buckingham raised a substantial force from his estates in Wales and the Marches. Henry, in exile in Brittany, enjoyed the support of the Breton treasurer Pierre Landais, who hoped Buckingham's victory would cement an alliance between Brittany and England.
Some of Henry Tudor's ships ran into a storm and were forced to return to Brittany or Normandy, while Henry himself anchored off Plymouth for a week before learning of Buckingham's failure. Buckingham's army was troubled by the same storm and deserted when Richard's forces came against them. Buckingham tried to escape in disguise, but was either turned in by a retainer for the bounty Richard had put on his head, or was discovered in hiding with him. He was convicted of treason and beheaded in Salisbury, near the Bull's Head Inn, on 2 November. His widow, Catherine Woodville, later married Jasper Tudor, the uncle of Henry Tudor. Richard made overtures to Landais, offering military support for Landais's weak regime under Francis II, Duke of Brittany, in exchange for Henry. Henry fled to Paris, where he secured support from the French regent Anne of Beaujeu, who supplied troops for an invasion in 1485.
Death at the Battle of Bosworth Field
On Monday 22 August 1485, Richard met the outnumbered forces of Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Richard rode a white courser (an especially swift and strong horse). The size of Richard's army has been estimated at 8,000 and Henry's at 5,000, but exact numbers are not known, though the royal army is believed to have "substantially" outnumbered Henry's. The traditional view of the king's famous cries of "Treason!" before falling was that during the battle Richard was abandoned by Baron Stanley (made Earl of Derby in October), Sir William Stanley, and Henry Percy, 4th Earl of Northumberland. However, the role of Northumberland is unclear; his position was with the reserve—behind the king's line—and he could not easily have moved forward without a general royal advance, which did not take place. Indeed, the physical confines behind the crest of Ambion Hill, combined with a difficulty of communications, probably physically hampered any attempt he made to join the fray. Despite appearing "a pillar of the Ricardian regime", and his previous loyalty to Edward IV, Baron Stanley was the stepfather of Henry Tudor, and Stanley's inaction combined with his brother's entering the battle on Tudor's behalf was fundamental to Richard's defeat. The death of Richard's close companion John Howard, Duke of Norfolk, may have had a demoralising effect on the king and his men. Either way, Richard led a cavalry charge deep into the enemy ranks in an attempt to end the battle quickly by striking at Henry Tudor himself.
Accounts note that King Richard fought bravely and ably during this manoeuvre, unhorsing Sir John Cheyne, a well-known jousting champion, killing Henry's standard bearer Sir William Brandon and coming within a sword's length of Henry Tudor before being surrounded by Sir William Stanley's men and killed. The Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet says that a Welshman struck the death-blow with a halberd while Richard's horse was stuck in the marshy ground. It was said that the blows were so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. The contemporary Welsh poet Guto'r Glyn implies a leading Welsh Lancastrian, Rhys ap Thomas, or one of his men killed the king, writing that he "killed the boar, shaved his head". The identification in 2013 of King Richard's body shows that the skeleton had 11 wounds, eight of them to the skull, clearly inflicted in battle and suggesting he had lost his helmet. Professor Guy Rutty, from the University of Leicester, said: "The most likely injuries to have caused the king's death are the two to the inferior aspect of the skull—a large sharp force trauma possibly from a sword or staff weapon, such as a halberd or bill, and a penetrating injury from the tip of an edged weapon." The skull showed that a blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. Richard III was the last English king to be killed in battle. Henry Tudor succeeded Richard as King Henry VII. He married the Yorkist heiress Elizabeth of York, Edward IV's daughter and Richard III's niece.
Polydore Vergil, Henry VII's official historian, recorded that "King Richard, alone, was killed fighting manfully in the thickest press of his enemies". Richard's naked body was then carried back to Leicester tied to a horse, and early sources strongly suggest that it was displayed in the collegiate Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of the Newarke, prior to being buried at Greyfriars Church in Leicester. In 1495, Henry VII paid for a marble and alabaster monument. According to a discredited tradition, during the Dissolution of the Monasteries, his body was thrown into the River Soar, although other evidence suggests that a memorial stone was visible in 1612, in a garden built on the site of Greyfriars. The exact location was then lost, owing to more than 400 years of subsequent development, until archaeological investigations in 2012 revealed the site of the garden and Greyfriars Church. There was a memorial ledger stone in the choir of the cathedral, since replaced by the tomb of the king, and a stone plaque on Bow Bridge where tradition had falsely suggested that his remains had been thrown into the river.
According to another tradition, Richard consulted a seer in Leicester before the battle who foretold that "where your spur should strike on the ride into battle, your head shall be broken on the return". On the ride into battle, his spur struck the bridge stone of Bow Bridge in the city; legend states that as his corpse was carried from the battle over the back of a horse, his head struck the same stone and was broken open.
Issue
Richard and Anne had one son, Edward of Middleham, who was born between 1474 and 1476. He was created Earl of Salisbury on 15 February 1478, and Prince of Wales on 24 August 1483, and died in March 1484, less than two months after he had been formally declared heir apparent. After the death of his son, Richard appointed his nephew John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, as Lieutenant of Ireland, an office previously held by his son Edward. Lincoln was the son of Richard's older sister, Elizabeth, Duchess of Suffolk. After his wife's death, Richard commenced negotiations with John II of Portugal to marry John's pious sister, Joanna, Princess of Portugal. She had already turned down several suitors because of her preference for the religious life.
Richard had two acknowledged illegitimate children, John of Gloucester and Katherine Plantagenet. Also known as 'John of Pontefract', John of Gloucester was appointed Captain of Calais in 1485. Katherine married William Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, in 1484. Neither the birth dates nor the names of the mothers of either of the children is known. Katherine was old enough to be wedded in 1484, when the age of consent was twelve, and John was knighted in September 1483 in York Minster, and so most historians agree that they were both fathered when Richard was a teenager. There is no evidence of infidelity on Richard's part after his marriage to Anne Neville in 1472 when he was around 20. This has led to a suggestion by the historian A. L. Rowse that Richard "had no interest in sex".
Michael Hicks and Josephine Wilkinson have suggested that Katherine's mother may have been Katherine Haute, on the basis of the grant of an annual payment of 100 shillings made to her in 1477. The Haute family was related to the Woodvilles through the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville's aunt, Joan Woodville, to William Haute. One of their children was Richard Haute, Controller of the Prince's Household. Their daughter, Alice, married Sir John Fogge; they were ancestors to Catherine Parr, sixth wife of King Henry VIII. They also suggest that John's mother may have been Alice Burgh. Richard visited Pontefract from 1471, in April and October 1473, and in early March 1474, for a week. On 1 March 1474, he granted Alice Burgh £20 a year for life "for certain special causes and considerations". She later received another allowance, apparently for being engaged as a nurse for his brother George's son, Edward of Warwick. Richard continued her annuity when he became king. John Ashdown-Hill has suggested that John was conceived during Richard's first solo expedition to the eastern counties in the summer of 1467 at the invitation of John Howard and that the boy was born in 1468 and named after his friend and supporter. Richard himself noted John was still a minor (not being yet 21) when he issued the royal patent appointing him Captain of Calais on 11 March 1485, possibly on his seventeenth birthday.
Both of Richard's illegitimate children survived him, but they seem to have died without issue and their fate after Richard's demise at Bosworth is not certain. John received a £20 annuity from Henry VII, but there are no mentions of him in contemporary records after 1487 (the year of the Battle of Stoke Field). He may have been executed in 1499, though no record of this exists beyond an assertion by George Buck over a century later. Katherine apparently died before her cousin Elizabeth of York's coronation on 25 November 1487, since her husband Sir William Herbert is described as a widower by that time. Katherine's burial place was located in the London parish church of St James Garlickhithe, between Skinner's Lane and Upper Thames Street. The mysterious Richard Plantagenet, who was first mentioned in Francis Peck's Desiderata Curiosa (a two-volume miscellany published 1732–1735) was said to be a possible illegitimate child of Richard III and is sometimes referred to as "Richard the Master-Builder" or "Richard of Eastwell", but it has also been suggested he could have been Richard, Duke of York, one of the missing Princes in the Tower. He died in 1550.
Legacy
Richard's Council of the North, described as his "one major institutional innovation", derived from his ducal council following his own viceregal appointment by Edward IV; when Richard himself became king, he maintained the same conciliar structure in his absence. It officially became part of the royal council machinery under the presidency of John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln in April 1484, based at Sandal Castle in Wakefield. It is considered to have greatly improved conditions for northern England, as it was intended to keep the peace and punish lawbreakers, as well as resolve land disputes. Bringing regional governance directly under the control of central government, it has been described as the king's "most enduring monument", surviving unchanged until 1641.
In December 1483, Richard instituted what later became known as the Court of Requests, a court to which poor people who could not afford legal representation could apply for their grievances to be heard. He also improved bail in January 1484, to protect suspected felons from imprisonment before trial and to protect their property from seizure during that time. He founded the College of Arms in 1484, he banned restrictions on the printing and sale of books, and he ordered the translation of the written Laws and Statutes from the traditional French into English. During his reign, Parliament ended the arbitrary benevolence (a device by which Edward IV raised funds), made it punishable to conceal from a buyer of land that a part of the property had already been disposed of to somebody else, required that land sales be published, laid down property qualifications for jurors, restricted the abusive Courts of Piepowders, regulated cloth sales, instituted certain forms of trade protectionism, prohibited the sale of wine and oil in fraudulent measure, and prohibited fraudulent collection of clergy dues, among others. Churchill implies he improved the law of trusts.
Richard's death at Bosworth resulted in the end of the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England since the succession of Henry II in 1154. The last legitimate male Plantagenet, Richard's nephew Edward, Earl of Warwick (son of his brother George, Duke of Clarence), was executed by Henry VII in 1499.
Reputation
There are numerous contemporary, or near-contemporary, sources of information about the reign of Richard III. These include the Croyland Chronicle, Commines' Mémoires, the report of Dominic Mancini, the Paston Letters, the Chronicles of Robert Fabyan and numerous court and official records, including a few letters by Richard himself. However, the debate about Richard's true character and motives continues, both because of the subjectivity of many of the written sources, reflecting the generally partisan nature of writers of this period, and because none was written by men with an intimate knowledge of Richard.
During Richard's reign, the historian John Rous praised him as a "good lord" who punished "oppressors of the commons", adding that he had "a great heart". In 1483 the Italian observer Mancini reported that Richard enjoyed a good reputation and that both "his private life and public activities powerfully attracted the esteem of strangers". His bond to the City of York, in particular, was such that on hearing of Richard's demise at the battle of Bosworth the City Council officially deplored the king's death, at the risk of facing the victor's wrath.
During his lifetime he was the subject of some attacks. Even in the North in 1482 a man was prosecuted for offences against the Duke of Gloucester, saying he did "nothing but grin at" the city of York. In 1484, attempts to discredit him took the form of hostile placards, the only surviving one being William Collingbourne's lampoon of July 1484 "The Cat, the Rat, and Lovell the Dog, all rule England under a Hog" which was pinned to the door of St. Paul's Cathedral and referred to Richard himself (the Hog) and his most trusted councillors William Catesby, Richard Ratcliffe and Francis, Viscount Lovell. On 30 March 1485 Richard felt forced to summon the Lords and London City Councillors to publicly deny the rumours that he had poisoned Queen Anne and that he had planned a marriage to his niece Elizabeth, at the same time ordering the Sheriff of London to imprison anyone spreading such slanders. The same orders were issued throughout the realm, including York where the royal pronouncement recorded in the City Records dates 5 April 1485 and carries specific instructions to suppress seditious talk and remove and destroy evidently hostile placards unread.
As for Richard's physical appearance, most contemporary descriptions bear out the evidence that aside from having one shoulder higher than the other (with chronicler Rous not able to correctly remember which one, as slight as the difference was), Richard had no other noticeable bodily deformity. John Stow talked to old men who, remembering him, said "that he was of bodily shape comely enough, only of low stature" and a German traveller, Nicolas von Poppelau, who spent ten days in Richard's household in May 1484, describes him as "three fingers taller than himself...much more lean, with delicate arms and legs and also a great heart." Six years after Richard's death, in 1491, a schoolmaster named William Burton, on hearing a defence of Richard, launched into a diatribe, accusing the dead king of being "a hypocrite and a crookback...who was deservedly buried in a ditch like a dog."
Richard's death encouraged the furtherance of this later negative image by his Tudor successors due to the fact that it helped to legitimise Henry VII's seizure of the throne. The Richard III Society contends that this means that "a lot of what people thought they knew about Richard III was pretty much propaganda and myth building." The Tudor characterisation culminated in the famous fictional portrayal of him in Shakespeare's play Richard III as a physically deformed, Machiavellian villain, ruthlessly committing numerous murders in order to claw his way to power; Shakespeare's intention perhaps being to use Richard III as a vehicle for creating his own Marlowesque protagonist. Rous himself in his History of the Kings of England, written during Henry VII's reign, initiated the process. He reversed his earlier position, and now portrayed Richard as a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. His body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength". Rous also attributes the murder of Henry VI to Richard, and claims that he poisoned his own wife. Jeremy Potter, a former Chair of the Richard III Society, claims that "At the bar of history Richard III continues to be guilty because it is impossible to prove him innocent. The Tudors ride high in popular esteem."
Polydore Vergil and Thomas More expanded on this portrayal, emphasising Richard's outward physical deformities as a sign of his inwardly twisted mind. More describes him as "little of stature, ill-featured of limbs, crook-backed ... hard-favoured of visage". Vergil also says he was "deformed of body ... one shoulder higher than the right". Both emphasise that Richard was devious and flattering, while planning the downfall of both his enemies and supposed friends. Richard's good qualities were his cleverness and bravery. All these characteristics are repeated by Shakespeare, who portrays him as having a hunch, a limp and a withered arm. With regard to the "hunch", the second quarto edition of Richard III (1598) used the term "hunched-backed" but in the First Folio edition (1623) it became "bunch-backed".
Richard's reputation as a promoter of legal fairness persisted, however. William Camden in his Remains Concerning Britain (1605) states that Richard, "albeit he lived wickedly, yet made good laws". Francis Bacon also states that he was "a good lawmaker for the ease and solace of the common people". In 1525, Cardinal Wolsey upbraided the aldermen and Mayor of London for relying on a statute of Richard to avoid paying an extorted tax (benevolence) but received the reply "although he did evil, yet in his time were many good acts made."
Richard was a practising Catholic, as shown by his personal Book of Hours, surviving in the Lambeth Palace library. As well as conventional aristocratic devotional texts, the book contains a Collect of Saint Ninian, referencing a saint popular in the Anglo-Scottish Borders.
Despite this, the image of Richard as a ruthless tyrant remained dominant in the 18th and 19th centuries. The 18th-century philosopher and historian David Hume described him as a man who used dissimulation to conceal "his fierce and savage nature" and who had "abandoned all principles of honour and humanity". Hume acknowledged that some historians have argued "that he was well qualified for government, had he legally obtained it; and that he committed no crimes but such as were necessary to procure him possession of the crown", but he dismissed this view on the grounds that Richard's exercise of arbitrary power encouraged instability. The most important late 19th century biographer of the king was James Gairdner, who also wrote the entry on Richard in the Dictionary of National Biography. Gairdner stated that he had begun to study Richard with a neutral viewpoint, but became convinced that Shakespeare and More were essentially correct in their view of the king, despite some exaggerations.
Richard was not without his defenders, the first of whom was Sir George Buck, a descendant of one of the king's supporters, who completed The history of King Richard the Third in 1619. The authoritative Buck text was published only in 1979, though a corrupted version was published by Buck's great-nephew in 1646. Buck attacked the "improbable imputations and strange and spiteful scandals" related by Tudor writers, including Richard's alleged deformities and murders. He located lost archival material, including the Titulus Regius, but also claimed to have seen a letter written by Elizabeth of York, according to which Elizabeth sought to marry the king. Elizabeth's supposed letter was never produced. Documents which later emerged from the Portuguese royal archives show that after Queen Anne's death, Richard's ambassadors were sent on a formal errand to negotiate a double marriage between Richard and the Portuguese king's sister Joanna, of Lancastrian descent, and between Elizabeth of York and Joanna's cousin Manuel, Duke of Viseu (later King of Portugal).
Significant among Richard's defenders was Horace Walpole. In Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third (1768), Walpole disputed all the alleged murders and argued that Richard may have acted in good faith. He also argued that any physical abnormality was probably no more than a minor distortion of the shoulders. However, he retracted his views in 1793 after the Terror, stating he now believed that Richard could have committed the crimes he was charged with, although Pollard observes that this retraction is frequently overlooked by later admirers of Richard. Other defenders of Richard include the noted explorer Clements Markham, whose Richard III: His Life and Character (1906) replied to the work of Gairdner. He argued that Henry VII killed the princes and that the bulk of evidence against Richard was nothing more than Tudor propaganda. An intermediate view was provided by Alfred Legge in The Unpopular King (1885). Legge argued that Richard's "greatness of soul" was eventually "warped and dwarfed" by the ingratitude of others.
Some twentieth-century historians have been less inclined to moral judgement, seeing Richard's actions as a product of the unstable times. In the words of Charles Ross, "the later fifteenth century in England is now seen as a ruthless and violent age as concerns the upper ranks of society, full of private feuds, intimidation, land-hunger, and litigiousness, and consideration of Richard's life and career against this background has tended to remove him from the lonely pinnacle of Villainy Incarnate on which Shakespeare had placed him. Like most men, he was conditioned by the standards of his age." The Richard III Society, founded in 1924 as "The Fellowship of the White Boar", is the oldest of several groups dedicated to improving his reputation. Other contemporary historians still describe him as a "power-hungry and ruthless politician" who was still most probably "ultimately responsible for the murder of his nephews."
In culture
Apart from Shakespeare, Richard appears in many other works of literature. Two other plays of the Elizabethan era predated Shakespeare's work. The Latin-language drama Richardus Tertius (first known performance in 1580) by Thomas Legge is believed to be the first history play written in England. The anonymous play The True Tragedy of Richard III (c. 1590), performed in the same decade as Shakespeare's work, was probably an influence on Shakespeare. Neither of the two plays places any emphasis on Richard's physical appearance, though the True Tragedy briefly mentions that he is "A man ill shaped, crooked backed, lame armed" and "valiantly minded, but tyrannous in authority". Both portray him as a man motivated by personal ambition, who uses everyone around him to get his way. Ben Jonson is also known to have written a play Richard Crookback in 1602, but it was never published and nothing is known about its portrayal of the king.
Marjorie Bowen's 1929 novel Dickon set the trend for pro-Ricardian literature. Particularly influential was The Daughter of Time (1951) by Josephine Tey, in which a modern detective concludes that Richard III is innocent in the death of the Princes. Other novelists such as Valerie Anand in the novel Crown of Roses (1989) have also offered alternative versions to the theory that he murdered them. Sharon Kay Penman, in her historical novel The Sunne in Splendour, attributes the death of the Princes to the Duke of Buckingham. In the mystery novel The Murders of Richard III by Elizabeth Peters (1974) the central plot revolves around the debate as to whether Richard III was guilty of these and other crimes. A sympathetic portrayal is given in The Founding (1980), the first volume in The Morland Dynasty series by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles.
One film adaptation of Shakespeare's play Richard III is the 1955 version directed and produced by Laurence Olivier, who also played the lead role. Also notable are the 1995 film version starring Ian McKellen, set in a fictional 1930s fascist England, and Looking for Richard, a 1996 documentary film directed by Al Pacino, who plays the title character as well as himself. The play has been adapted for television on several occasions.
Discovery of remains
On 24 August 2012, the University of Leicester and Leicester City Council, in association with the Richard III Society, announced that they had joined forces to begin a search for the remains of King Richard. The search for Richard III was led by Philippa Langley of the Society's Looking For Richard Project with the archaeological work led by University of Leicester Archaeological Services (ULAS). Experts set out to locate the lost site of the former Greyfriars Church (demolished during Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries), and to discover whether his remains were still interred there. By comparing fixed points between maps in a historical sequence, the search located the church, where Richard's body had been hastily buried without pomp in 1485, its foundations identifiable beneath a modern-day city centre car park.
The excavators announced on 5 September 2012 that they had identified Greyfriars Church and two days later that they had identified the location of Robert Herrick's garden, where the memorial to Richard III stood in the early 17th century. A human skeleton was found beneath the Church's choir.
Improbably, the excavators found the remains in the first location in which they dug at the car park. Coincidentally, they lay almost directly under a roughly painted R on the tarmac. This had existed since the early 2000s to signify a reserved parking space.
On 12 September, it was announced that the skeleton discovered during the search might be that of Richard III. Several reasons were given: the body was of an adult male; it was buried beneath the choir of the church; and there was severe scoliosis of the spine, possibly making one shoulder higher than the other (to what extent depended on the severity of the condition). Additionally, there was an object that appeared to be an arrowhead embedded in the spine; and there were perimortem injuries to the skull. These included a relatively shallow orifice, which is most likely to have been caused by a rondel dagger, and a scooping depression to the skull, inflicted by a bladed weapon, most probably a sword.
Further, the bottom of the skull presented a gaping hole, where a halberd had cut away and entered it. Forensic pathologist Stuart Hamilton stated that this injury would have left the individual's brain visible, and most certainly would have been the cause of death. Jo Appleby, the osteo-archaeologist who excavated the skeleton, concurred and described the latter as "a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull". The base of the skull also presented another fatal wound in which a bladed weapon had been thrust into it, leaving behind a jagged hole. Closer examination of the interior of the skull revealed a mark opposite this wound, showing that the blade penetrated to a depth of .
In total, the skeleton presented ten wounds: four minor injuries on the top of the skull, one dagger blow on the cheekbone, one cut on the lower jaw, two fatal injuries on the base of the skull, one cut on a rib bone, and one final wound on the pelvis, most probably inflicted after death. It is generally accepted that postmortem, Richard's naked body was tied to the back of a horse, with his arms slung over one side and his legs and buttocks over the other. This presented a tempting target for onlookers, and the angle of the blow on the pelvis suggests that one of them stabbed Richard's right buttock with substantial force, as the cut extends from the back all the way to the front of the pelvic bone and was most probably an act of humiliation. It is also possible that Richard and his corpse suffered other injuries which left no trace on the skeleton.
British historian John Ashdown-Hill had used genealogical research in 2004 to trace matrilineal descendants of Anne of York, Duchess of Exeter, Richard's elder sister. A British-born woman who emigrated to Canada after the Second World War, Joy Ibsen (), was found to be a 16th-generation great-niece of the king in the same direct maternal line. Her mitochondrial DNA was tested and belongs to mitochondrial DNA haplogroup J, which by deduction, should also be the mitochondrial DNA haplogroup of Richard III. Joy Ibsen died in 2008. Her son Michael Ibsen gave a mouth-swab sample to the research team on 24 August 2012. His mitochondrial DNA passed down the direct maternal line was compared to samples from the human remains found at the excavation site and used to identify King Richard.
On 4 February 2013, the University of Leicester confirmed that the skeleton was beyond reasonable doubt that of King Richard III. This conclusion was based on mitochondrial DNA evidence, soil analysis, and dental tests (there were some molars missing as a result of caries), as well as physical characteristics of the skeleton which are highly consistent with contemporary accounts of Richard's appearance. The team announced that the "arrowhead" discovered with the body was a Roman-era nail, probably disturbed when the body was first interred. However, there were numerous perimortem wounds on the body, and part of the skull had been sliced off with a bladed weapon; this would have caused rapid death. The team concluded that it is unlikely that the king was wearing a helmet in his last moments. Soil taken from the remains was found to contain microscopic roundworm eggs. Several eggs were found in samples taken from the pelvis, where the king's intestines were, but not from the skull and only very small numbers were identified in soil surrounding the grave. The findings suggest that the higher concentration of eggs in the pelvic area probably arose from a roundworm infection the king suffered in his life, rather than from human waste dumped in the area at a later date, researchers said. The mayor of Leicester announced that the king's skeleton would be re-interred at Leicester Cathedral in early 2014, but a judicial review of that decision delayed the reinterment for a year. A museum to Richard III was opened in July 2014 in the Victorian school buildings next to the Greyfriars grave site.
The proposal to have King Richard buried in Leicester attracted some controversy. Those who challenged the decision included fifteen "collateral [non-direct] descendants of Richard III", represented by the Plantagenet Alliance, who believed that the body should be reburied in York, as they claim the king wished. In August 2013, they filed a court case in order to contest Leicester's claim to re-inter the body within its cathedral, and propose the body be buried in York instead. However, Michael Ibsen, who gave the DNA sample that identified the king, gave his support to Leicester's claim to re-inter the body in their cathedral. On 20 August, a judge ruled that the opponents had the legal standing to contest his burial in Leicester Cathedral, despite a clause in the contract which had authorized the excavations requiring his burial there. He urged the parties, though, to settle out of court in order to "avoid embarking on the Wars of the Roses, Part Two". The Plantagenet Alliance, and the supporting fifteen collateral descendants, also faced the challenge that "Basic maths shows Richard, who had no surviving children but five siblings, could have millions of 'collateral' descendants" undermining the group's claim to represent "the only people who can speak on behalf of him". A ruling in May 2014 decreed that there are "no public law grounds for the Court interfering with the decisions in question". The remains were taken to Leicester Cathedral on 22 March 2015 and reinterred on 26 March.
On 5 February 2013 Professor Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Dundee conducted a facial reconstruction of Richard III, commissioned by the Richard III Society, based on 3D mappings of his skull. The face is described as "warm, young, earnest and rather serious". On 11 February 2014 the University of Leicester announced the project to sequence the entire genome of Richard III and one of his living relatives, Michael Ibsen, whose mitochondrial DNA confirmed the identification of the excavated remains. Richard III thus became the first ancient person of known historical identity whose genome has been sequenced. In 2016 contemporary British artist Alexander de Cadenet presented a skull portrait of Richard III in conjunction with Leicester University. The portraits have been produced using University of Leicester forensic X-ray scans of the king.
In November 2014, the results of the testing were announced, confirming that the maternal side was as previously thought. The paternal side, however, demonstrated some variance from what had been expected, with the DNA showing no links to the purported descendants of Richard's great-great-grandfather Edward III of England through Henry Somerset, 5th Duke of Beaufort. This could be the result of covert illegitimacy that does not reflect the accepted genealogies between Richard and Edward III or between Edward III and the 5th Duke of Beaufort.
Reburial and tomb
After his death in battle in 1485, Richard III's body was buried in Greyfriars Church in Leicester. Following the discoveries of Richard's remains in 2012, it was decided that they should be reburied at Leicester Cathedral, despite feelings in some quarters that he should have been reburied in York Minster. His remains were carried in procession to the cathedral on 22 March 2015, and reburied on 26 March 2015 at a religious re-burial service at which both Tim Stevens, the Bishop of Leicester, and Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated. The British royal family was represented by the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester and the Countess of Wessex. The actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who later portrayed him in The Hollow Crown television series, read a poem by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy.
Richard's cathedral tomb was designed by the architects van Heyningen and Haward. The tombstone is deeply incised with a cross, and consists of a rectangular block of white Swaledale fossil stone, quarried in North Yorkshire. It sits on a low plinth made of dark Kilkenny marble, incised with Richard's name, dates and motto (Loyaulte me lie – loyalty binds me). The plinth also carries his coat of arms in pietra dura. The remains of Richard III are in a lead-lined inner casket, inside an outer English oak coffin crafted by Michael Ibsen, a direct descendant of Richard's sister Anne, and laid in a brick-lined vault below the floor, and below the plinth and tombstone. The original 2010 raised tomb design had been proposed by Langley's "Looking For Richard Project" and fully funded by members of the Richard III Society. The proposal was publicly launched by the Society on 13 February 2013 but rejected by Leicester Cathedral in favour of a memorial slab. However, following a public outcry, the Cathedral changed its position and on 18 July 2013 announced its agreement to give King Richard III a raised tomb monument.
Titles, styles, honours and arms
On 1 November 1461, Richard gained the title of Duke of Gloucester; in late 1461, he was invested as a Knight of the Garter. Following the death of King Edward IV, he was made Lord Protector of England. Richard held this office from 30 April to 26 June 1483, when he made himself king. During his reign, Richard was styled Dei Gratia Rex Angliae et Franciae et Dominus Hiberniae (by the Grace of God, King of England and France and Lord of Ireland).
Informally, he may have been known as "Dickon", according to a sixteenth-century legend of a note, warning of treachery, that was sent to the Duke of Norfolk on the eve of Bosworth:
Arms
As Duke of Gloucester, Richard used the Royal Arms of England quartered with the Royal Arms of France, differenced by a label argent of three points ermine, on each point a canton gules, supported by a blue boar. As sovereign, he used the arms of the kingdom undifferenced, supported by a white boar and a lion. His motto was Loyaulte me lie, "Loyalty binds me"; and his personal device was a white boar.
Family trees
See also
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
Ricardian (Richard III)
Richard III Museum, York
Notes
References
Sources
Further reading
External links
King Richard III Visitor Centre, Leicester
The Richard III Society website
The Richard III Society, American Branch website
Information about the discovery of Richard III from the University of Leicester
, with commentary by Pamela Tudor-Craig
1452 births
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"\n\nTrack listing\n Opening Overture\n \"I Get a Kick Out of You\" (Cole Porter)\n \"You Are the Sunshine of My Life\" (Stevie Wonder)\n \"You Will Be My Music\" (Joe Raposo)\n \"Don't Worry 'bout Me\" (Ted Koehler, Rube Bloom)\n \"If\" (David Gates)\n \"Bad, Bad Leroy Brown\" (Jim Croce)\n \"Ol' Man River\" (Jerome Kern, Oscar Hammerstein II)\n Famous Monologue\n Saloon Trilogy: \"Last Night When We Were Young\"/\"Violets for Your Furs\"/\"Here's That Rainy Day\" (Harold Arlen, E.Y. Harburg)/(Matt Dennis, Tom Adair)/(Jimmy Van Heusen, Johnny Burke)\n \"I've Got You Under My Skin\" (Porter)\n \"My Kind of Town\" (Sammy Cahn, Van Heusen)\n \"Let Me Try Again\" (Paul Anka, Cahn, Michel Jourdan)\n \"The Lady Is a Tramp\" (Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart)\n \"My Way\" (Anka, Claude Francois, Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibaut)\n\nFrank Sinatra's Monologue About the Australian Press\nI do believe this is my interval, as we say... We've been having a marvelous time being chased around the country for three days. You know, I think it's worth mentioning because it's so idiotic, it's so ridiculous what's been happening. We came all the way to Australia because I chose to come here. I haven't been here for a long time and I wanted to come back for a few days. Wait now, wait. I'm not buttering anybody at all. I don't have to. I really don't have to. I like coming here. I like the people. I love your attitude. I like the booze and the beer and everything else that comes into the scene. I also like the way the country's growing and it's a swinging place.\n\nSo we come here and what happens? We gotta run all day long because of the parasites who chase us with automobiles. That's dangerous, too, on the road, you know. Might cause an accident. They won't quit. They wonder why I won't talk to them. I wouldn't drink their water, let alone talk to them. And if any of you folks in the press are in the audience, please quote me properly. Don't mix it up, do it exactly as I'm saying it, please. Write it down very clearly. One idiot called me up and he wanted to know what I had for breakfast. What the hell does he care what I had for breakfast? I was about to tell him what I did after breakfast. Oh, boy, they're murder! We have a name in the States for their counterparts: They're called parasites. Because they take and take and take and never give, absolutely, never give. I don't care what you think about any press in the world, I say they're bums and they'll always be bums, everyone of them. There are just a few exceptions to the rule. Some good editorial writers who don't go out in the street and chase people around. Critics don't bother me, because if I do badly, I know I'm bad before they even write it, and if I'm good, I know I'm good before they write it. It's true. I know best about myself. So, a critic is a critic. He doesn't anger me. It's the scandal man who bugs you, drives you crazy. It's the two-bit-type work that they do. They're pimps. They're just crazy, you know. And the broads who work in the press are the hookers of the press. Need I explain that to you? I might offer them a buck and a half... I'm not sure. I once gave a chick in Washington $2 and I overpaid her, I found out. She didn't even bathe. Imagine what that was like, ha, ha.\n\nNow, it's a good thing I'm not angry. Really. It's a good thing I'm not angry. I couldn't care less. The press of the world never made a person a star who was untalented, nor did they ever hurt any artist who was talented. So we, who have God-given talent, say, \"To hell with them.\" It doesn't make any difference, you know. And I want to say one more thing. From what I see what's happened since I was last here... what, 16 years ago? Twelve years ago. From what I've seen to happen with the type of news that they print in this town shocked me. And do you know what is devastating? It's old-fashioned. It was done in America and England twenty years ago. And they're catching up with it now, with the scandal sheet. They're rags, that's what they are. You use them to train your dog and your parrot. What else do I have to say? Oh, I guess that's it. That'll keep them talking to themselves for a while. I think most of them are a bunch of fags anyway. Never did a hard day's work in their life. I love when they say, \"What do you mean, you won't stand still when I take your picture?\" All of a sudden, they're God. We gotta do what they want us to do. It's incredible. A pox on them... Now, let's get down to some serious business here...\n\nSee also\nConcerts of Frank Sinatra\n\nFrank Sinatra",
"A Man's Gotta Do is a 2004 Australian award winning film from Australian director, Chris Kennedy. The film stars John Howard.\n\nTagline \nMost men hold their head high, put their backs to the wall and do what they must do to give their family what they want.\n\nPlot \n\nIn A Man's Gotta Do, Eddy (John Howard), lives with his wife, Yvonne (Rebecca Frith), and their daughter, Chantelle (Alyssa McClelland), in a new suburb in the Illawarra part, south of Sydney.\n\nEddy is a fisherman by day, but by night he works as a standover man, literally a toe-cutter. Dominic, (Gyton Grantley), is his new offsider.\n\nChantelle is upset because her fiancé, Rudi, a Russian air conditioning specialist, has disappeared. Did her Dad have something to do with it?\n\nThe frustrated Yvonne begins flirting with Paul, the plumber, (Rohan Nicol). Eddy encourages Dominic to read his daughter's diary thinking that's the way to get a better understanding of her needs.\n\nReception\n\nReviews \nThe film received Mixed reviews. Australian TV show At the Movies gave it three and a half stars. It holds a 40 metascore, with the Village voice giving it 30/100\n\nAwards \nThe film wasn't nominated for many awards but did win the only award it was nominated for, a Golden Zenith for the Best film from Oceania at the Montreal Film Festival.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\nAustralian films\nAustralian comedy films\n2004 films\n2004 comedy films"
] |
[
"Julian Assange",
"Personal life"
] |
C_cfe6fad9a6db45d1a0f1798136a0fb32_1
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Where does Assange live?
| 1 |
Where does Assange live?
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Julian Assange
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003-2006), but did not complete a degree. While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. In an open letter to French President Francois Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him. CANNOTANSWER
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,
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Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.
Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.
Early life
Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. They separated in 1982.
Julian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.
In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.
Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.
In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
Founding WikiLeaks
Early publications
Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.
WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.
WikiLeaks released a report disclosing a "serious nuclear accident" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.
Iraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables
The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".
Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".
Other Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.
WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.
Legal issues
US criminal investigation
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.
In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.
In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.
In 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.
In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.
Some Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 "Manhunting Timeline", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.
In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter".
Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.
In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.
On 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a "very, very poor judicial system" and a culture of "crazed radical feminist ideology". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that "Sweden is a U.S. satrapy." In a later interview he described Sweden as "the Saudi Arabia of feminism." On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.
After previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.
In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".
On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.
Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".
Ecuadorian embassy period
Entering the embassy
On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said "We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so," whilst adding, "The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.
The UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.
WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".
On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.
WikiLeaks publishing
On 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.
In July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the "Syria Files" collection
In 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.
By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".
In June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.
On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."
In December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.
Public positions
WikiLeaks Party
Assange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".
Operation Speargun
Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".
On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."
Other developments
In 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the "legal and diplomatic quagmire" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying "the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.
On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses", and called the panel's ruling "flawed in law". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as "Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country."
In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.
On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.
2016 U.S. presidential election
During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.
In February 2016, Assange wrote: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".
On 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.
Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."
In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.
A 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.
In April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a "brazen attack on American democracy". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.
Seth Rich
In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."
Assange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.
Later years in the embassy
In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.
On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.
On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."
Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.
In February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was "no longer right or proportionate to pursue him" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its "purpose and its function". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.
In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.
On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.
In October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."
On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to".
In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.
Surveillance of Assange in the embassy
On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.
Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.
In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.
Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.
Imprisonment and extradition proceedings
Arrest in the embassy
On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.
On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a "miserable hacker". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest "has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.
Conviction for breach of bail
On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse".
Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.
Espionage indictment in the United States
In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. "I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case."
On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.
On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.
Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.
While some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".
Imprisonment in the UK
Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.
After examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the "secretive grand jury indictment in the United States", the "abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences", the "termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process", and the "overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of "spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.
On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.
On 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.
On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
On 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a "dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison" which could lead to his death and that his "politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in "retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars". The petition said, Assange's publications "were clearly in the public interest and not espionage". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.
On 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.
On 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, "reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange", in which they state their "professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture".
In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.
Hearings on extradition to the U.S.
On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.
Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a "perception of bias". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.
On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:
In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.
Assange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:
Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;
Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and
Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).
The US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack" and "[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.
Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.
Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.
To coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls "the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn".
Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.
On 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.
Appeal and other developments
On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.
Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".
In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.
In June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.
In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.
In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: "Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange]," "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.
On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.
Writings and opinions
Assange has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".
In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."
Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.
In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.
In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been "considered in the usual way by the prison governor".
Assessments
Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that "Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, "I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously" and that she would be giving "100 per cent of my attention and resources" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe".
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash."
Honours and awards
Works
Bibliography
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .
When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .
The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).
Filmography
As himself
The War You Don't See (2010)
The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
Citizenfour (2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
Asylum (2016)
Risk (2016)
Architects of Denial (2017)
The New Radical (2017)
See also
List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
List of peace activists
Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States
Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May
Ross Ulbricht
Thomas A. Drake
Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.
Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Notes
References
Further reading
Books
Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
Films
Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
Risk (2016), American documentary.
Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.
Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.
External links
1971 births
21st-century Australian male writers
Activists from Melbourne
Articles containing video clips
Australian computer programmers
Australian editors
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian founders
Australian libertarians
Australian publishers (people)
Australian whistleblowers
Australia–United States relations
Central Queensland University alumni
Cypherpunks
Inmates of HM Prison Belmarsh
Internet activists
Living people
Media critics
Open content activists
People associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
People associated with the 2016 United States presidential election
People from Townsville
People with Asperger syndrome
Political party founders
Prisoners and detainees of England and Wales
RT (TV network) people
United Kingdom–United States relations
University of Melbourne alumni
WikiLeaks
| false |
[
"Observe. Hack. Make. also known as OHM, was an outdoor hacker conference that took place in the Netherlands from July 31 to August 4, 2013.\n\nThis conference was the most recent event in a sequence that began with the Galactic Hacker Party in 1989, followed by Hacking at the End of the Universe in 1993, Hacking In Progress in 1997, Hackers At Large in 2001 What the Hack in 2005, and Hacking at Random in 2009. The tradition continued in Summer 2017 with Still Hacking Anyway.\n\nWith 3000 tickets sold the camp was completely sold out weeks before the camp started. With 700 more tickets compared to the last camp is was the biggest Dutch hacker camp so far.\n\nJulian Assange\nOne of the highlights of this event was a live video connection with Julian Assange. After his appearance at Hacking at Random in 2009 the organizers invited Julian Assange again. This time he spoke to the audience over a live video connection from the Ecuador embassy in London.\n\nReferences\n\nHacker conventions",
"Assange v The Swedish Prosecution Authority were the set of legal proceedings in the United Kingdom concerning the requested extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden for a 'preliminary investigation' into accusations of sexual offences. The proceedings began in 2012. On 12 August 2015, Swedish prosecutors announced that they had dropped their investigation into three of the allegations against Assange, because the statute of limitations had expired. The investigation into the rape allegation was dropped by Swedish authorities on 19 May 2017. Assange said in these proceedings that he feared he would ultimately be extradited to the United States if he were sent to Sweden.\n\nIn May 2019, Swedish prosecutors reopened the investigation against Assange. The prosecutors expressed the intent to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom after he served his 50-week prison sentence for skipping bail.\n\nIn June 2019 the Uppsala District Court denied a request to detain Assange, thereby preventing his extradition to Sweden. It said the Swedish investigation did not require Assange's presence in Sweden. The prosecutor said she intended to issue a European Investigation Order to interview Assange instead.\n\nThe prosecution announced that the investigation had been dropped as of 19 November 2019.\n\nSwedish investigation\n\nComplaints and initial investigation\nOn 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enköping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm, reported to the Swedish police that Assange had engaged in unprotected sexual activity with them that violated the scope of their consent, also because one woman was asleep in one case. The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take an STD test, but that their statements would be passed to a prosecutor.\n\nThe next day, the case was transferred to (Chief Public Prosecutor) Eva Finné. In answer to questions the following day, Finné declared, \"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape\". However, Karin Rosander from the Swedish Prosecution Authority said Assange remained suspected of molestation. Police gave no further comment at the time, but continued the investigation.\n\nAfter learning of the investigation, Assange said, \"The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing\".\n\nThe preliminary investigation concerning suspected rape was discontinued by Finné on 25 August, but two days later Claes Borgström, the attorney representing the two women, requested a review of the prosecutor's decision to drop part of the investigation.\n\nOn 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police regarding the alleged sexual molestation. He denied them, and said he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.\n\nInvestigation reinstated \nOn 18 August 2010, Assange applied for a work and residence permit in Sweden. On 1 September 2010, Överåklagare (Director of Public Prosecution) Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation concerning all of the original allegations. On 18 October 2010, his permit was denied. He left Sweden on 27 September 2010.\n\nAssange's London lawyer Mark Stephens said that Assange had asked before leaving Sweden for an interview by prosecutors, but was told he could leave the country without it. Swedish prosecutors said that on the day Assange left Sweden they had informed Assange's Swedish lawyer that an arrest warrant would be issued for Assange.\n\nArrest warrant \nOn 18 November 2010, Marianne Ny ordered the detention of Julian Assange on suspicion of rape, three cases of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. The Stockholm District Court acceded to the order and issued a European Arrest Warrant to execute it. The warrant was appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal which upheld it, but lowered the charge to suspicion of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and two cases of sexual molestation rather than three. The warrant was also appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden, which decided not to hear the case. Assange's legal team argued that there is no such thing as \"minor rape\", that \"rape\" is a mistranslation from Swedish, and that the allegations given do not meet the English or European legal definition of \"rape\".\n\nAt this time Assange had been living in the United Kingdom for 1–2 months. An extradition hearing took place in an English court in February 2011 to consider an application by Swedish authorities for the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The outcome of the hearing was announced on 24 February 2011, when the extradition warrant was upheld. Assange appealed to the High Court. On 2 November 2011, the court upheld the extradition decision and rejected all four grounds for the appeal as presented by Assange's legal representatives. £19,000 costs was also awarded against Assange. On 5 December 2011, Assange was refused permission by the High Court to appeal to the Supreme Court. The High Court certified that his case raised a point of law of general public importance. The Supreme Court subsequently granted permission to appeal, and heard the appeal on 1 and 2 February 2012. The court reserved its judgment and dismissed the appeal on 30 May 2012. Assange has said the investigation is \"without basis\". He remained on conditional bail in the United Kingdom. On 19 June 2012, Assange sought refuge at Ecuador's Embassy in London and was granted temporary asylum. On 16 August 2012, he was granted full asylum by the Ecuadorian government due to fears of political persecution and extradition to the United States. Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but believed that the Swedish charges were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.\n\nReview of detention order \nOn the 24 June 2014, The Guardian reported that Assange's lawyers filed a request to Stockholm District Court to dismiss his detention, based on an update to Sweden's code of judicial procedure (1 June 2014) to conform with EU law including a new provision that those arrested or detained have the right to be made aware of \"facts forming the basis for the decision to arrest\".\n\nOn 16 July 2014, the Stockholm District Court reviewed the detention order at Assange's request. During the proceedings, Assange's defence lawyers said that the prosecutors have a \"duty\" to advance the case, and that they had shown \"passivity\" in refusing to go to London to interview Assange. After hearing evidence, the district court concluded that there was probable cause to suspect Assange of committing the alleged crimes, and that the detention order should remain in place.\n\nIn response, Assange's Swedish legal team stated to Radio Sweden: \"We still think we have very good legal arguments to get this decision overruled, so we are confident in the result of the appeal. We think the court of appeal can make another decision on the same arguments as the district court.\" Ecuador immediately issued a statement: \"The Ecuadorian Government reaffirms its offer of judicial cooperation to the Kingdom of Sweden, to reach a prompt solution to the case. In this sense Ecuador keeps its invitation to judicial officers visit the London Embassy so that Julian Assange can be interviewed or via videoconference. Both possibilities are explicitly referred in the current procedural legislation in Sweden and the European Union.\"\n\nOn 20 November 2014, the Swedish Court of Appeal refused Assange's appeal, upholding the 2010 detention order, though at the same time issuing a statement criticising the prosecution for not having done more to advance the case by proceeding with an interrogation of Assange.\n\nThree allegations dropped \nOn 12 August 2015, Swedish prosecutors announced that, as the statute of limitations for the less serious allegations had run out, and they had not succeeded in interviewing Assange, they would end part of their preliminary investigation. After 18 August 2015, Assange could no longer be charged for any of the three less serious charges. However, the preliminary investigation into the more serious allegation remained open as the statute of limitations for this charge was not expected to expire until 2020. Swedish authorities interviewed Assange on this allegation in November 2016.\n\nRevocation of arrest warrant\n\nOn 19 May 2017, the Swedish chief prosecutor applied to the Stockholm District Court to rescind the arrest warrant for Julian Assange, effectively ceasing their investigation against Julian Assange. The case may be reinstated until the expiration of the statute of limitations. Additionally, Britain's arrest warrant pertaining to bail violations remains open.\n\nIn 2013, Sweden tried to drop the Assange extradition but the English Crown Prosecution Service dissuaded them from doing so.\n\nApril 2019: political asylum withdrawn\nIn May 2019 Swedish Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Eva-Marie Persson applied to have Assange detained as a prelude to the issue of a European arrest warrant and extradition to Sweden. The Uppsala District Court denied the request, stating that the investigation did not require Assange's presence in Sweden. Persson said she intended to issue a European Investigation Order to interview Assange instead.\n\nInvestigation dropped\nThe prosecution announced that the investigation had been dropped as of 19 November 2019.\n\nExtradition process\n\nFirst instance proceedings\n\nDetention and bail\nAssange presented himself to the Metropolitan Police on December 7, 2010, and was remanded to London's Wandsworth Prison. On 16 December, he was granted bail with bail conditions of residence at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, and wearing of an electronic tag. Bail was set at £240,000 surety with a deposit of £200,000 ($312,700).\n\nOn release on bail, Assange said \"I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter,\" and told the BBC, \"This has been a very successful smear campaign and a very wrong one.\" He claimed that the Swedish extradition proceedings were \"actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US.\" Swedish prosecutors denied that the case had anything to do with WikiLeaks.\n\nExtradition hearing\nThe extradition hearing took place on 7–8 and 11 February 2011 before the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court sitting at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in London. Assange's lawyers at the extradition hearing were Geoffrey Robertson QC and Mark Stephens, human rights specialists, and the prosecution was represented by a team led by Clare Montgomery QC. Arguments were presented as to whether the Swedish prosecutor had the authority to issue a European Arrest Warrant, the extradition was requested for prosecution or interrogation, the alleged crimes qualified as extradition crimes, there was an abuse of process, his human rights would be respected, and he would receive a fair trial if extradited to Sweden.\n\nExtradition decision\nThe outcome of the hearing was announced on 24 February 2011, when the extradition warrant was upheld. Senior District Judge Howard Riddle found against Assange on each of the main arguments against his extradition. The judge said \"as a matter of fact, and looking at all the circumstances in the round, this person (Mr Assange) passes the threshold of being an accused person and is wanted for prosecution.\" Judge Riddle concluded: \"I am satisfied that the specified offences are extradition offences.\"\n\nAssange commented after the decision to extradite him, saying \"It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system run amok.\"\n\nAppeal to the High Court\nOn 2 March 2011, Assange's lawyers lodged an appeal with the High Court challenging the decision to extradite him to Sweden. Assange remained on conditional bail. The appeal hearing took place on 12 and 13 July 2011 at the High Court in London. The judges' decision was reserved, and a written judgment was delivered on 2 November 2011, dismissing the appeal.\n\nAppeal to the Supreme Court\nThe High Court refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but this was granted by the Supreme Court itself, after the High Court certified that a point of law of general public importance was involved in its decision.\n\nThe point of law certified was whether the wording Judicial Authority in the 2003 Extradition Act was to be interpreted as a “person who is competent to exercise judicial authority and that such competence requires impartiality and independence of both the executive and the parties” or if it “embraces a variety of bodies, some of which have the qualities of impartiality and independence …and some of which do not.”\n\nThe Supreme Court heard the appeal on 1 and 2 February 2012. The court reserved its judgment, and dismissed the appeal by a 5–2 majority on 30 May 2012.\n\nThe court granted Assange two weeks to make an application to reopen the appeal after his counsel argued the judgments of the majority relied on an interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties that was not argued during the hearing. The application was rejected on 14 June, thereby exhausting Assange's legal options in the United Kingdom.\n\nEcuador asylum and bail forfeiture \n\nFrom 19 June 2012, Assange lived in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he asked for and was granted political asylum due to fears of political persecution and extradition to the United States. Because Assange did not comply with his bail conditions, his supporters forfeited £93,500.\n\nAssange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy until 11 April 2019, when he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service (for violating his 2012 bail conditions) after the police were invited in by the Ambassador of Ecuador to the United Kingdom.\n\nAssange's lawyers invited the Swedish prosecutor four times to come and question him at the embassy, but the offer was refused. In March 2015, faced with the prospect of the Swedish statute of limitations expiring for some of the allegations, the prosecutor relented and agreed to question Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. The UK agreed to the interview in May awaiting Ecuadorean approval.\n\nAssange said he would go to Sweden if provided with a diplomatic guarantee that he would not be turned over to the United States, to which the Swedish foreign ministry stated that Sweden's legislation does not allow any judicial decision like extradition to be predetermined.\nHowever, the Swedish government is free to reject extradition requests from non-EU countries, independent of any court decision.\n\nAccusations \nAssange was arrested in his absence and wanted for questioning in relation to accusations against him of rape and sexual molestation. This was the first step in the criminal prosecution procedure in Sweden, and only after the questioning would the prosecution authority be able to formally indict him.\n\nRole of the Crown Prosecution Service\nThe leaking of correspondence between Swedish prosecutors and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has provided an insight into the role the CPS played in the Swedish investigation.\n\nIn 2011, the CPS advised Swedish prosecutors not to interview Assange in Britain. In the same year, the CPS told Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny that year: \"It is simply amazing how much work this case is generating. It sometimes seems like an industry. Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.\"\n\nWhen the CPS was advised by Swedish prosecutors that it could drop the extradition case in August 2012, the CPS lawyer handling the case wrote: \"Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!\".\n\nAfter previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the CPS in 2013. Her letter said that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.\n\nThe CPS deleted emails communications that were sent between it and the Swedish prosecutors when a CPS lawyer retired in 2014.\n\nEmail exchanges between the CPS and its Swedish counterparts over the high-profile case were deleted after the lawyer at the UK end retired in 2014.\n\nOn 20 October 2015, a new batch of documents resulting from a Freedom of Information request to the Swedish authorities filed by the Italian news magazine l'Espresso was published online. They contain records of correspondence between the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the Crown Prosecution Service. A CPS lawyer wrote in an email to Marianne Ny that \"it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK... He would of course have no obligation under English law to answer any questions put to him.... any attempt to interview under strict Swedish law would invariably be fraught with problems.\" Referring to the case itself, he wrote, \"It is simply amazing how much work this is generating... Do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request.\" Assange's legal team stated that, following these revelations, they would probably challenge the extradition request in court again.\n\nAssange's supporters have accused the CPS of changing its description of the status of the case to suit its own interests. They state that the CPS declared the case as live in April 2013 in order to avoid satisfying a personal data request by Assange and said the case was closed in 2014 to justify its deletion of emails about the case.\n\nDecision to interview Assange in London \nIn March 2015, Marianne Ny indicated that she would allow Assange to be interviewed in London, and that the interview would be conducted by a deputy prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, as well as a police investigator. In December 2015, Ecuador stated that it had reached a deal with Sweden which would allow him to be interviewed in the Embassy. In September 2016, Ecuador set a date for Assange's interview over the rape allegation. The date was 17 October 2016. It was established that the interview would be conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor, with Isgren and a police officer present. The interview was subsequently postponed until 14 November 2016, \"to ensure the presence of Mr Assange’s attorneys,\" according to a spokesman for Assange's legal team. According to Assange's lawyer, the \"shape\" of the questions was still being discussed a week before the scheduled interview. Assange released his testimony to the public on 7 December. In his statement, Assange says that his Swedish lawyer was not actually permitted to be present during the interview, among many other complaints concerning the length and irregularities of the process and events leading up to it.\n\nUnited Nations condemnation \nOn 5 February 2016, it was announced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights that the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments. High Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein reaffirmed later the same month that the opinion is based on international law. Immediately following the opinion's publication, Assange's lawyers asked the Stockholm District Court to lift the European arrest warrant. On 14 April, the Swedish prosecution authorities responded saying the warrant should be upheld. The Svea Court of Appeal decided to uphold the warrant on 16 September. After being asked by the British to review the case, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally declined to do so in late November, saying that there was not enough new information provided to warrant such a review.\n\nOffers to Obama Administration \n\nAssange and his supporters have expressed concerns that upon his return to Sweden, Assange may be extradited to the United States to face charges related to his professional work, since Wikileaks has been under investigation in the US since at least 2010. On 13 January 2017, Wikileaks announced that Assange would agree to extradition to the United States if the Obama administration granted clemency to Chelsea Manning though he claimed the charges that might be pressed against him there had no merit. The offer followed one made via Assange's attorney in September 2016 that an extradition waiver would be made conditional on a pardon for Manning. Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted on Obama's last day in office but Assange's lawyers stated that the 120 day delay in her release did not meet the conditions of their offer.\n\nStatements made by Trump Administration \n\nTwo weeks before the Swedish arrest warrant for Assange was dropped, one of his lawyers, Per Samuelson, reiterated his opposition to it saying \"With the Supreme Court's own reasoning, his detention should now be rescinded because we can now prove that the U.S. is hunting Julian Assange.\" This followed public statements made by CIA Director Mike Pompeo that Wikileaks was a \"hostile intelligence service\" and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the U.S. was stepping up its efforts against leaks of sensitive information when asked about Assange.\n\nThe United States commenced extradition proceedings in February 2020. Assange \"faces a maximum 175 years imprisonment for the 18 offences listed in the US indictment\".\n\nMelzer's investigation\nUN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer investigated the rape accusations against Assange and said he had never before seen a comparable case where a person was subjected to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges being filed. He said Assange's lawyers made over 30 offers to arrange for Assange to visit Sweden in exchange for a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the U.S and described such diplomatic assurances as routine international practice. Melzer criticised Swedish prosecutors for, among other things, allegedly changing one of the women's statements without her involvement, to make it sound like a possible rape. Melzer described the Swedish rape investigation as \"abuse of judicial processes aimed at pushing a person into a position where he is unable to defend himself\". One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a \"proper rape-victim\" should act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially \"untrue and defamatory\". Melzer published a statement in which he tries to resolve misunderstandings and hopes that they will not divert attention away from the problems in the case of Assange. Later the woman said, that Assange's action has not been a crime for her and that she has \"long forgiven\" Assange.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nJudiciary of England and Wales - High Court judgement in the case\n\n2011 in case law\n2011 in the United Kingdom\n2011 in Sweden\nExtradition case law\nSweden–United Kingdom relations\nHigh Court of Justice cases\nSupreme Court of the United Kingdom cases\n2012 in case law\n2012 in British law\n2012 in Sweden\nEcuador–United Kingdom relations\nEcuador–Sweden relations\n2012 in international relations\nWikiLeaks\nJulian Assange\n\nsv:Julian Assange#Misstankar om sexualbrott"
] |
[
"Julian Assange",
"Personal life",
"Where does Assange live?",
"Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,"
] |
C_cfe6fad9a6db45d1a0f1798136a0fb32_1
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Is Assange married?
| 2 |
Is Assange married?
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Julian Assange
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003-2006), but did not complete a degree. While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. In an open letter to French President Francois Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him. CANNOTANSWER
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Assange married a woman named Teresa,
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Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.
Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.
Early life
Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. They separated in 1982.
Julian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.
In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.
Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.
In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
Founding WikiLeaks
Early publications
Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.
WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.
WikiLeaks released a report disclosing a "serious nuclear accident" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.
Iraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables
The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".
Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".
Other Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.
WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.
Legal issues
US criminal investigation
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.
In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.
In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.
In 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.
In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.
Some Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 "Manhunting Timeline", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.
In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter".
Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.
In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.
On 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a "very, very poor judicial system" and a culture of "crazed radical feminist ideology". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that "Sweden is a U.S. satrapy." In a later interview he described Sweden as "the Saudi Arabia of feminism." On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.
After previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.
In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".
On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.
Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".
Ecuadorian embassy period
Entering the embassy
On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said "We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so," whilst adding, "The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.
The UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.
WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".
On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.
WikiLeaks publishing
On 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.
In July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the "Syria Files" collection
In 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.
By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".
In June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.
On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."
In December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.
Public positions
WikiLeaks Party
Assange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".
Operation Speargun
Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".
On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."
Other developments
In 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the "legal and diplomatic quagmire" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying "the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.
On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses", and called the panel's ruling "flawed in law". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as "Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country."
In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.
On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.
2016 U.S. presidential election
During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.
In February 2016, Assange wrote: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".
On 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.
Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."
In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.
A 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.
In April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a "brazen attack on American democracy". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.
Seth Rich
In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."
Assange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.
Later years in the embassy
In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.
On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.
On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."
Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.
In February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was "no longer right or proportionate to pursue him" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its "purpose and its function". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.
In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.
On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.
In October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."
On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to".
In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.
Surveillance of Assange in the embassy
On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.
Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.
In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.
Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.
Imprisonment and extradition proceedings
Arrest in the embassy
On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.
On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a "miserable hacker". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest "has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.
Conviction for breach of bail
On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse".
Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.
Espionage indictment in the United States
In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. "I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case."
On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.
On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.
Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.
While some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".
Imprisonment in the UK
Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.
After examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the "secretive grand jury indictment in the United States", the "abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences", the "termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process", and the "overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of "spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.
On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.
On 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.
On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
On 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a "dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison" which could lead to his death and that his "politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in "retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars". The petition said, Assange's publications "were clearly in the public interest and not espionage". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.
On 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.
On 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, "reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange", in which they state their "professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture".
In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.
Hearings on extradition to the U.S.
On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.
Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a "perception of bias". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.
On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:
In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.
Assange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:
Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;
Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and
Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).
The US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack" and "[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.
Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.
Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.
To coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls "the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn".
Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.
On 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.
Appeal and other developments
On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.
Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".
In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.
In June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.
In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.
In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: "Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange]," "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.
On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.
Writings and opinions
Assange has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".
In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."
Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.
In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.
In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been "considered in the usual way by the prison governor".
Assessments
Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that "Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, "I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously" and that she would be giving "100 per cent of my attention and resources" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe".
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash."
Honours and awards
Works
Bibliography
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .
When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .
The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).
Filmography
As himself
The War You Don't See (2010)
The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
Citizenfour (2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
Asylum (2016)
Risk (2016)
Architects of Denial (2017)
The New Radical (2017)
See also
List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
List of peace activists
Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States
Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May
Ross Ulbricht
Thomas A. Drake
Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.
Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Notes
References
Further reading
Books
Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
Films
Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
Risk (2016), American documentary.
Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.
Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.
External links
1971 births
21st-century Australian male writers
Activists from Melbourne
Articles containing video clips
Australian computer programmers
Australian editors
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian founders
Australian libertarians
Australian publishers (people)
Australian whistleblowers
Australia–United States relations
Central Queensland University alumni
Cypherpunks
Inmates of HM Prison Belmarsh
Internet activists
Living people
Media critics
Open content activists
People associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
People associated with the 2016 United States presidential election
People from Townsville
People with Asperger syndrome
Political party founders
Prisoners and detainees of England and Wales
RT (TV network) people
United Kingdom–United States relations
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"The Embassy of Ecuador in London is the diplomatic mission of Ecuador in the United Kingdom. It is headed by the ambassador of Ecuador to the United Kingdom. It is located in the Knightsbridge area of London, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. It is in an apartment building which also houses the Embassy of Colombia as well as a number of residential apartments, near Harrods, Hyde Park, and Hans Place, at 3 Hans Crescent at the intersection with Basil Street, and it is close to Knightsbridge Underground station.\n\nFor almost seven years the embassy was famously home to the Australian activist and journalist Julian Assange, who initially entered on 19 June 2012 claiming diplomatic asylum, which was granted by the Ecuadorian government on 16 August 2012. He had absconded in breach of bail after dismissal of his appeal by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.\n\nFunctions\nThe embassy is charged with representing the interests of the president and government of Ecuador, improving diplomatic relations between Ecuador and the accredited countries, promoting and improving the image and standing of Ecuador in the accredited nations, promoting the culture of Ecuador, encouraging and facilitating tourism to and from Ecuador, and ensuring the safety of Ecuadorians abroad.\n\nThe structure that houses the embassy is a white stucco-fronted red-brick building on Hans Crescent in the Knightsbridge area of London. The embassy is a suite of rooms occupying part of the ground floor of the building, which is an apartment block.\n\nEcuador also maintains a consulate at 144-146 Kings Cross Road, London WC1X 9DU and an Office of the Naval Assistant and Permanent Representative to the International Maritime Organization at 61 Wimbledon Hill Road, Wimbledon, London.\n\nJulian Assange's refuge\n\nThe co-founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, was a resident of the embassy for seven years after entering it on 19 June 2012 to claim diplomatic asylum after being wanted by Swedish authorities for questioning over four alleged sexual offences. Assange's asylum request was eventually granted by the Ecuadorian government in August 2012. The Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in May 2017, claiming they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case.\n\nThe British government had suggested it could use its discretionary powers under the Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act 1987 to enter the embassy and arrest Assange after giving the embassy due notice. However, it later retracted the suggestion, following condemnation from Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño and President Rafael Correa. Patiño described the British government's statement as \"a clear breach of international law and the protocols set out in the Vienna Convention.\"\n\nOn 16 August 2012, police and protesters gathered outside the embassy, with reports of minor scuffles between the two groups and arrests of some of the protesters. On 19 August 2012, Assange made a speech from a low balcony of the embassy. Assange's remarks were prefaced by a statement from Baltasar Garzón, who is heading his legal team. This was followed by protests in Ecuador outside the British embassy in Quito, as well as support for Correa's approval of the asylum request.\n\nOn 22 August 2012, the Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa stated that Assange would be allowed to stay in the embassy indefinitely, but that Ecuador would be open to negotiations with the British government if it withdrew its threats to storm the embassy.\n\nIn August 2014, Assange called a press conference and announced he would be leaving the embassy \"soon\".\n\nPress photographs taken outside the embassy were reported to have shown police notes stating that Assange was to be arrested \"under all circumstances\". The policing of the embassy during the first two years of Assange's stay reportedly cost £6.5 million. Before the police guard was lifted in February 2015, costs of policing Assange had reached £10 million.\n\nThe Guardian revealed in May 2018 that Ecuador had employed an international security company for more than five years to monitor Assange's visitors.\n\nOn 3 April 2019, WikiLeaks claimed that the Ecuadorian embassy would expel Assange within a few hours or days but Jose Valencia, Foreign Minister of Ecuador called it a rumour. Two days later the statements of Assange's departure came after the Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno accused Assange of repeatedly violating the terms of asylum. On 11 April 2019, Assange was arrested by British authorities who were invited into the embassy by the Ecuadorian government.\n\nSee also\n Embassy of Colombia, London\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\nBuildings and structures in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea\nLondon\nEcuador\nEcuador–United Kingdom relations\nKnightsbridge\nJulian Assange",
"Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet is a 2012 book by Julian Assange, in discussion with Internet activists and cypherpunks Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. Its primary topic is society's relationship with information security. In the book, the authors warn that the Internet has become a tool of the police state, and that the world is inadvertently heading toward a form of totalitarianism. They promote the use of cryptography to protect against state surveillance.\n\nIn the introduction, Assange says that the book is \"not a manifesto [...] [but] a warning\". He told Guardian journalist Decca Aitkenhead:\n\nAssange later wrote in The Guardian: \"Strong cryptography is a vital tool in fighting state oppression.\" saying that was the message of his book, Cypherpunks.\n\nCypherpunks is published by OR Books. Its content derives from discussions in June 2012 with Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann on Assange's TV show World Tomorrow.\n\nTopics by chapter \n Increased communication versus increased surveillance\n The militarization of cyberspace\n Fighting total surveillance with the laws of man\n Private sector spying\n Fighting total surveillance with the laws of physics\n The Internet and politics\n The Internet and economics\n Censorship\n Privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful\n Rats in the opera house\n\nSee also \n Computer and network surveillance\n Secrecy\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n2012 non-fiction books\nJulian Assange\nOR Books books\nComputer security books\nCryptography\nInternet privacy\nWorks about privacy\nCypherpunks"
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"Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,",
"Is Assange married?",
"Assange married a woman named Teresa,"
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C_cfe6fad9a6db45d1a0f1798136a0fb32_1
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Did Assange get divorced from Teresa?
| 3 |
Did Assange get divorced from Teresa?
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Julian Assange
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003-2006), but did not complete a degree. While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. In an open letter to French President Francois Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him. CANNOTANSWER
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The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child.
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Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.
Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.
Early life
Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. They separated in 1982.
Julian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.
In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.
Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.
In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
Founding WikiLeaks
Early publications
Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.
WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.
WikiLeaks released a report disclosing a "serious nuclear accident" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.
Iraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables
The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".
Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".
Other Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.
WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.
Legal issues
US criminal investigation
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.
In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.
In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.
In 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.
In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.
Some Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 "Manhunting Timeline", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.
In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter".
Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.
In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.
On 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a "very, very poor judicial system" and a culture of "crazed radical feminist ideology". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that "Sweden is a U.S. satrapy." In a later interview he described Sweden as "the Saudi Arabia of feminism." On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.
After previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.
In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".
On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.
Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".
Ecuadorian embassy period
Entering the embassy
On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said "We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so," whilst adding, "The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.
The UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.
WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".
On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.
WikiLeaks publishing
On 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.
In July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the "Syria Files" collection
In 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.
By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".
In June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.
On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."
In December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.
Public positions
WikiLeaks Party
Assange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".
Operation Speargun
Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".
On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."
Other developments
In 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the "legal and diplomatic quagmire" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying "the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.
On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses", and called the panel's ruling "flawed in law". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as "Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country."
In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.
On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.
2016 U.S. presidential election
During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.
In February 2016, Assange wrote: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".
On 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.
Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."
In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.
A 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.
In April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a "brazen attack on American democracy". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.
Seth Rich
In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."
Assange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.
Later years in the embassy
In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.
On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.
On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."
Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.
In February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was "no longer right or proportionate to pursue him" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its "purpose and its function". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.
In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.
On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.
In October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."
On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to".
In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.
Surveillance of Assange in the embassy
On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.
Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.
In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.
Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.
Imprisonment and extradition proceedings
Arrest in the embassy
On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.
On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a "miserable hacker". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest "has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.
Conviction for breach of bail
On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse".
Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.
Espionage indictment in the United States
In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. "I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case."
On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.
On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.
Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.
While some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".
Imprisonment in the UK
Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.
After examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the "secretive grand jury indictment in the United States", the "abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences", the "termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process", and the "overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of "spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.
On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.
On 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.
On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
On 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a "dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison" which could lead to his death and that his "politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in "retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars". The petition said, Assange's publications "were clearly in the public interest and not espionage". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.
On 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.
On 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, "reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange", in which they state their "professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture".
In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.
Hearings on extradition to the U.S.
On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.
Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a "perception of bias". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.
On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:
In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.
Assange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:
Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;
Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and
Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).
The US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack" and "[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.
Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.
Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.
To coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls "the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn".
Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.
On 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.
Appeal and other developments
On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.
Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".
In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.
In June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.
In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.
In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: "Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange]," "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.
On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.
Writings and opinions
Assange has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".
In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."
Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.
In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.
In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been "considered in the usual way by the prison governor".
Assessments
Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that "Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, "I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously" and that she would be giving "100 per cent of my attention and resources" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe".
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash."
Honours and awards
Works
Bibliography
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .
When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .
The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).
Filmography
As himself
The War You Don't See (2010)
The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
Citizenfour (2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
Asylum (2016)
Risk (2016)
Architects of Denial (2017)
The New Radical (2017)
See also
List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
List of peace activists
Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States
Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May
Ross Ulbricht
Thomas A. Drake
Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.
Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Notes
References
Further reading
Books
Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
Films
Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
Risk (2016), American documentary.
Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.
Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.
External links
1971 births
21st-century Australian male writers
Activists from Melbourne
Articles containing video clips
Australian computer programmers
Australian editors
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian founders
Australian libertarians
Australian publishers (people)
Australian whistleblowers
Australia–United States relations
Central Queensland University alumni
Cypherpunks
Inmates of HM Prison Belmarsh
Internet activists
Living people
Media critics
Open content activists
People associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
People associated with the 2016 United States presidential election
People from Townsville
People with Asperger syndrome
Political party founders
Prisoners and detainees of England and Wales
RT (TV network) people
United Kingdom–United States relations
University of Melbourne alumni
WikiLeaks
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[
"Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.\n\nIn November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had \"weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question.\"\n\nDuring the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.\n\nOn 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be \"oppressive\" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.\n\nAssange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.\n\nEarly life \nAssange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as \"a member of an Australian cult\" called The Family. They separated in 1982.\n\nJulian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.\n\nIn 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as \"Trax\" and \"Prime Suspect\", formed a hacking group they called \"the International Subversives\". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.\n\nIn September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.\n\nAssange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.\n\nIn 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website \"giving advice on computer security\" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.\n\nAssange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but \"didn't do anything with it\". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: \"This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency.\"\n\nFounding WikiLeaks\n\nEarly publications\n\nAssange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the \"Petrogate\" oil scandal in Peru.\n\nWikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily \"operate outside the rule of law\", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.\n\nIn September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.\n\nWikiLeaks released a report disclosing a \"serious nuclear accident\" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.\n\nIraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables\n\nThe material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.\n\nIn April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.\n\nIn October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would \"correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war\".\n\nRegarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, \"We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit\".\n\nOther Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.\n \nWikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the \"Cablegate\" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.\n\nLegal issues\n\nUS criminal investigation\n\nAfter WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was \"an active, ongoing criminal investigation\" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.\n\nIn August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.\n\nIn December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as \"absolute nonsense\". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.\n\nIn 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.\n\nIn June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and \"several government agencies\", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under \"active and ongoing\" investigation at that time.\n\nSome Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 \"Manhunting Timeline\", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a \"malicious foreign actor\", thus increasing the surveillance against it.\n\nIn January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a \"wanted journalist\" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its \"sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter\".\n\nUnder the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.\n\nIn April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.\n\nSwedish sexual assault allegations\n\nAssange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.\n\nOn 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a \"very, very poor judicial system\" and a culture of \"crazed radical feminist ideology\". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that \"Sweden is a U.S. satrapy.\" In a later interview he described Sweden as \"the Saudi Arabia of feminism.\" On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.\n\nAfter previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.\n\nIn March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of \"lesser degree rape\".\n\nOn 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.\n\nFollowing Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, \"the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed\".\n\nEcuadorian embassy period\n\nEntering the embassy\n\nOn 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.\n\nAssange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.\n\nBritish Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said \"We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so,\" whilst adding, \"The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum.\"\n\nAssange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.\n\nThe UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that \"such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention\". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy \"several overt and covert tactics to arrest him\". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.\n\nWikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a \"declaration of abandonment\".\n\nOn 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that \"as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger\". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.\n\nWikiLeaks publishing\nOn 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.\n\nIn July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the \"Syria Files\" collection \n\nIn 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.\n\nBy 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as \"a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents\".\n\nIn June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.\n\nOn 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the \"Yemen Files\", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: \"The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare.\"\n\nIn December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.\n\nPublic positions\nWikiLeaks Party\nAssange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.\n\nEdward Snowden\nIn 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding \"reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States\" as \"a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity\". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that \"[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation\".\n\nOperation Speargun\nDocuments provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called \"Operation Speargun\". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that \"Operation Speargun\" represented \"an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand\".\n\nOn 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: \"France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger.\"\n\nOther developments \n\nIn 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the \"legal and diplomatic quagmire\" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying \"the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know\". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.\n\nOn 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was \"ridiculous\" and that the group was \"made up of lay people\", and called Assange a \"fugitive from justice\" who \"can come out any time he chooses\", and called the panel's ruling \"flawed in law\". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is \"not binding on British law\". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as \"Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country.\"\n\nIn September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.\n\nOn 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.\n\n2016 U.S. presidential election\n\nDuring the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.\n\nIn February 2016, Assange wrote: \"I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States.\" On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. \"Personally, I would prefer neither.\" In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that \"The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers.\"\n\nOn 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a \"liberal war hawk\".\n\nOn 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.\n\nIn mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.\n\nCybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that \"WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort.\"\n\nIn interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of \"a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria\" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes \"material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere,\" that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.\n\nA 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.\n\nIn April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a \"brazen attack on American democracy\". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks \"did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place\" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.\n\nSeth Rich\n\nIn a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was \"simply a murder,\" to which Assange answered, \"No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that.\" WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: \"We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications.\"\n\nAssange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange \"implied falsely\" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.\n\nLater years in the embassy\n\nIn March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks \"a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia\". Assange accused the CIA of trying to \"subvert\" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found \"no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved.\" Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.\n\nOn 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.\n\nOn 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made \"on instructions from the president\". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.\n\nIn August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing \"increasingly absurd fabrications\" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released \"Spy Files Russia,\" revealing \"how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM).\" According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, \"experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services.\"\n\nAssange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.\n\nIn February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was \"no longer right or proportionate to pursue him\" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its \"purpose and its function\". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.\n\nIn March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as \"an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange\". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.\n\nOn 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.\n\nIn October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his \"fundamental rights and freedoms\" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.\n\nIn November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered \"smutty\". Anderson responded that \"[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this.\"\n\nOn 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the \"Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to\".\n\nIn February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.\n\nIn March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to \"ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence\" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.\n\nSurveillance of Assange in the embassy\nOn 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that \"material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report\" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.\n\nOn 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.\n\nMorales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.\n\nSpanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.\n\nIn a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.\n\nBritain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.\n\nImprisonment and extradition proceedings\n\nArrest in the embassy\n\nOn 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.\n\nOn 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a \"miserable hacker\". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest \"has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US\". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.\n\nConviction for breach of bail\nOn the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was \"unacceptable\" to air the claim in front of a \"packed press gallery\" and that Assange was \"a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest\" and he had \"not come close to establishing reasonable excuse\".\n\nAssange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened \"principles of necessity and proportionality\" for what it considered a \"minor violation\". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.\n\nEspionage indictment in the United States\n\nIn 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.\n\nIn February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she \"believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government\". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. \"I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case.\"\n\nOn 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.\n\nOn 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.\n\nMost cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.\n\nThe Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.\n\nWhile some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was \"a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security\". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would \"set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future\". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is \"a major threat to global media freedom\". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange \"for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest\".\n\nImprisonment in the UK\n\nSince his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.\n\nAfter examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that \"in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma.\" The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the \"secretive grand jury indictment in the United States\", the \"abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences\", the \"termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process\", and the \"overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest\". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of \"spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives\". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.\n\nOn 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.\n\nOn 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.\n\nOn 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.\n\nOn 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's \"continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.\"\n\nOn 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a \"dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison\" which could lead to his death and that his \"politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent\". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in \"retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars\". The petition said, Assange's publications \"were clearly in the public interest and not espionage\". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.\n\nOn 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.\n\nOn 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, \"reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange\", in which they state their \"professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture\".\n\nIn September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.\n\nHearings on extradition to the U.S.\n\nOn 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, \"I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people\". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.\n\nTowards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a \"perception of bias\". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.\n\nOn 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:\n\nIn February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.\n\nAssange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:\n Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;\n Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;\n Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and\n Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).\nThe US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment \"broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions\", alleging that Assange \"communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack\" and \"[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash\". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.\n\nSome witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.\n\nPatrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook \"an increasingly sophisticated operation\" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.\n\nTo coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls \"the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn\".\n\nHearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.\n\nOn 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.\n\nAppeal and other developments \nOn 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.\n\nFollowing the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be \"oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States,\" in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that \"Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)\". The United States also assured that it \"will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him.\" An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, \"Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise\".\n\nIn June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as \"Teenager\" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.\n\nIn June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.\n\nIn August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called \"a misleading report\" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.\n\nIn October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: \"Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange],\" \"there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him\" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court \"not to trust [the] assurances\" of the \"same government\" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.\n\nOn 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.\n\nWritings and opinions\n\nAssange has written a few short pieces, including \"State and terrorist conspiracies\" (2006), \"Conspiracy as governance\" (2006), \"The hidden curse of Thomas Paine\" (2008), \"What's new about WikiLeaks?\" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, \"the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen\". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song \"Multi Viral\" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that \"WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical\".\n\nIn 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, \"I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan.\" Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered \"a work in progress\" and \"entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me.\" In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. \"The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses,\" O'Hagan recalled. \"He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning.\" Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece \"is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose.\"\n\nAssange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.\n\nIn 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, \"that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization.\" Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had \"distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase.\" He added, \"We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world.\"\n\nPersonal life\nWhile in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.\n\nIn 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been \"considered in the usual way by the prison governor\".\n\nAssessments\n\nViews on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that \"Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government.\" In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said \"They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression\". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference \"Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?\" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as \"illegal\", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he \"would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers\". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host \"Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!\" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that \"Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept.\" In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US \"for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan\".\n\nIn July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, \"I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously\" and that she would be giving \"100 per cent of my attention and resources\" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, \"no journalist who challenges power will be safe\".\n\nAmerican politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as \"a high-tech terrorist\" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, \"It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash.\"\n\nHonours and awards\n\nWorks\n\nBibliography\n Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)\n Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .\n When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .\n The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).\n\nFilmography\n\nAs himself\n The War You Don't See (2010)\n The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode \"At Long Last Leave\")\n Citizenfour (2014)\n The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)\n Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)\n Asylum (2016)\n Risk (2016)\n Architects of Denial (2017)\n The New Radical (2017)\n\nSee also\n List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission\n List of peace activists\n Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States\n Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May\n Ross Ulbricht\n Thomas A. Drake\n Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.\n Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nBooks\n \n Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).\n\nFilms\n Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.\n Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.\n The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.\n Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.\n We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.\n Risk (2016), American documentary.\n Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.\n Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.\n\nExternal links\n\n1971 births\n21st-century Australian male writers\nActivists from Melbourne\nArticles containing video clips\nAustralian computer programmers\nAustralian editors\nAustralian expatriates in the United Kingdom\nAustralian founders\nAustralian libertarians\nAustralian publishers (people)\nAustralian whistleblowers\nAustralia–United States relations\nCentral Queensland University alumni\nCypherpunks\nInmates of HM Prison Belmarsh\nInternet activists\n \nLiving people\nMedia critics\nOpen content activists\nPeople associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections\nPeople associated with the 2016 United States presidential election\nPeople from Townsville\nPeople with Asperger syndrome\nPolitical party founders\nPrisoners and detainees of England and Wales\nRT (TV network) people\nUnited Kingdom–United States relations\nUniversity of Melbourne alumni\nWikiLeaks",
"Hans Moser (30 September 1944 – 2 July 2016) was prominent as a pornographic-film director and producer, photographer and magazine publisher. He is also known as Sascha Alexander.\n\nBorn in Hanover, Germany, he was the eldest son of ethnic German refugees from Romania and Hungary. He discovered Teresa Orlowski in 1981. He married her in 1982 in a ceremony in Las Vegas. They divorced in 1989. He then married Sarah Louise Young on 13 January 1991, but they divorced amicably a decade later.\n\nHans Moser's grandson, Paul Moser, currently works and lives in St Louis, MO.\n\nSelected filmography\nBorn for Love (1987) - a German-American co-production featuring Sibylle Rauch, John Leslie, Karin Schubert, Joey Silvera, Elle Rio, Jamie Summers, Tom Byron, Sharon Kane and others.\nFoxy Lady 01-12 (1984–1986) - he made these movies with Teresa Orlowski, the first German porn star.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Note: Without his movies with Teresa Orlowski.\n\n1944 births\n2016 deaths\nPhotographers from Lower Saxony\nGerman pornographic film producers\nGerman pornographic film directors\nFilm people from Hanover"
] |
[
"Julian Assange",
"Personal life",
"Where does Assange live?",
"Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,",
"Is Assange married?",
"Assange married a woman named Teresa,",
"Did Assange get divorced from Teresa?",
"The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child."
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Who is their child?
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Who is Julian Assange and Teresa 's child?
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Julian Assange
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003-2006), but did not complete a degree. While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. In an open letter to French President Francois Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him. CANNOTANSWER
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they had a son, Daniel Assange,
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Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.
Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.
Early life
Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. They separated in 1982.
Julian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.
In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.
Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.
In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
Founding WikiLeaks
Early publications
Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.
WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.
WikiLeaks released a report disclosing a "serious nuclear accident" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.
Iraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables
The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".
Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".
Other Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.
WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.
Legal issues
US criminal investigation
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.
In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.
In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.
In 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.
In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.
Some Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 "Manhunting Timeline", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.
In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter".
Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.
In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.
On 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a "very, very poor judicial system" and a culture of "crazed radical feminist ideology". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that "Sweden is a U.S. satrapy." In a later interview he described Sweden as "the Saudi Arabia of feminism." On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.
After previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.
In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".
On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.
Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".
Ecuadorian embassy period
Entering the embassy
On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said "We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so," whilst adding, "The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.
The UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.
WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".
On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.
WikiLeaks publishing
On 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.
In July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the "Syria Files" collection
In 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.
By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".
In June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.
On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."
In December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.
Public positions
WikiLeaks Party
Assange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".
Operation Speargun
Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".
On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."
Other developments
In 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the "legal and diplomatic quagmire" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying "the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.
On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses", and called the panel's ruling "flawed in law". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as "Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country."
In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.
On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.
2016 U.S. presidential election
During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.
In February 2016, Assange wrote: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".
On 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.
Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."
In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.
A 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.
In April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a "brazen attack on American democracy". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.
Seth Rich
In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."
Assange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.
Later years in the embassy
In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.
On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.
On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."
Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.
In February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was "no longer right or proportionate to pursue him" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its "purpose and its function". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.
In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.
On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.
In October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."
On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to".
In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.
Surveillance of Assange in the embassy
On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.
Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.
In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.
Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.
Imprisonment and extradition proceedings
Arrest in the embassy
On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.
On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a "miserable hacker". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest "has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.
Conviction for breach of bail
On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse".
Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.
Espionage indictment in the United States
In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. "I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case."
On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.
On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.
Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.
While some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".
Imprisonment in the UK
Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.
After examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the "secretive grand jury indictment in the United States", the "abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences", the "termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process", and the "overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of "spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.
On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.
On 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.
On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
On 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a "dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison" which could lead to his death and that his "politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in "retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars". The petition said, Assange's publications "were clearly in the public interest and not espionage". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.
On 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.
On 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, "reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange", in which they state their "professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture".
In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.
Hearings on extradition to the U.S.
On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.
Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a "perception of bias". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.
On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:
In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.
Assange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:
Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;
Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and
Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).
The US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack" and "[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.
Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.
Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.
To coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls "the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn".
Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.
On 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.
Appeal and other developments
On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.
Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".
In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.
In June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.
In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.
In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: "Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange]," "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.
On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.
Writings and opinions
Assange has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".
In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."
Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.
In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.
In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been "considered in the usual way by the prison governor".
Assessments
Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that "Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, "I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously" and that she would be giving "100 per cent of my attention and resources" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe".
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash."
Honours and awards
Works
Bibliography
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .
When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .
The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).
Filmography
As himself
The War You Don't See (2010)
The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
Citizenfour (2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
Asylum (2016)
Risk (2016)
Architects of Denial (2017)
The New Radical (2017)
See also
List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
List of peace activists
Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States
Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May
Ross Ulbricht
Thomas A. Drake
Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.
Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Notes
References
Further reading
Books
Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
Films
Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
Risk (2016), American documentary.
Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.
Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.
External links
1971 births
21st-century Australian male writers
Activists from Melbourne
Articles containing video clips
Australian computer programmers
Australian editors
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian founders
Australian libertarians
Australian publishers (people)
Australian whistleblowers
Australia–United States relations
Central Queensland University alumni
Cypherpunks
Inmates of HM Prison Belmarsh
Internet activists
Living people
Media critics
Open content activists
People associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
People associated with the 2016 United States presidential election
People from Townsville
People with Asperger syndrome
Political party founders
Prisoners and detainees of England and Wales
RT (TV network) people
United Kingdom–United States relations
University of Melbourne alumni
WikiLeaks
| false |
[
"Child marriage is a worldwide phenomenon, in which children are forced to enter into a marriage bond. Child marriage is an increasing problem within many African countries. In South Sudan, child marriage is a growing epidemic. Child Marriage is a violation of women's and children's rights. The age range for these children to marry is between the age of twelve and eighteen. Although, 18 is the legal age to marry, many cultural practices are placed higher than the actual law in underrepresented countries. Marriages are granted approval with a parental consent. Underage marriage is an uncomfortable topic, yet it is practiced widely by the Fathers of the families, in countries that experience poverty. This happens in order to have financial stability through dowry, the increase in bride price, and the alleviation out of poverty.\n\nChild marriage does not only pertain to young girls, it also has its effects on young boys. In many African Countries, like South Sudan, child marriage is related to girls. Child marriage usually pertains to the bond between a child and an adult.\n\nCurrent figures\nIn 2017 in South Sudan, 52% of girls are married off before the age of 18. 9% are married before they turn 15. South Sudan is the 5th highest nation in the world for child marriage.\n\nAge and initiation \nThe common age range of children who are forced into marriage is from fifteen years old to eighteen years old. Many children are married off under the age of fifteen. In South Sudan, a child is someone who is not capable of having children. Therefore, a child who has begun her menstrual cycle, puberty, and can produce children is an adult. The discrepancy of what a child is, considered to be is a problem today. Families in South Sudan do not allow their children to marry men from other tribes, due to the significance of the symbolism and traditional aspects of the culture. A girl’s value depends on her age. This means that the younger in age the woman is, the higher her value increases. This makes it easier for the girl to be married off. The older the women is the more difficult it is for her to find marriage. The older a woman gets the less value she is to a marriage.\n\nChild Marriage in South Sudan is commonly seem in rural parts of the country and not in urban areas. In these parts, traditional law has power over legislative law. The decision of a child to get married is put into action by the Father. The Mother does not have any say in regards with decisions that are supposed to benefit the family. A child that is married off is solely for economic reasons. This increases the Families status in the society. When girls are married to the man that is courting them, the family is generously awarded with gifts in the form of Dowry. Dowry is one of the most important factors that coincide with child marriage. Dowry is given out in the form of cattle which shows great respect to the family. The man that the child is being married off to supplies the family with cattle and riches to show his appreciation. In many cases, these rewards alleviates the family of hardships in the form of poverty. The idea of dowry is also related to the women's education. The more educated the women is, the more value she has and the more dowry her family gets.\n\nAn educated women is said to be a suitable marriage partner by many men in South Sudan. Yet, when a woman’s education is taken from her, she has no other option. A girl can also be seen a problem or burden to her family if she is not married off. The more dowry a family has, the more wealth and status they hold. Girls who have had many years of higher education are not as likely to get married as children.\n\nBride price \nChild Marriages are some of the most expensive marriages. Bride price is similar to that of Dowry. The more value that a child has, the more money a man has to pay for her. Bride price is related to a man's status. When a man does not find wife, his value and standing in society goes down. When bride price inflation happens, young men will not be able to afford marriage. Without an income, young men are not worth anything and cannot purchase a wife.\n\nHealth \nMany health problems are related to children who are forced into a marriage. Health problems in rural places are not treated sanitarily which results in infections and death. Early pregnancies are not treated as they should. The toll on the girls body is not taken into consideration because of the status that women in South Sudan hold. They are inferior to men. Sanitation is a major problem. When girls go into labor, they are only taken to the hospital if strenuous problems arise. If not, they are expected to deliver their children in unsterilized places. Maternal health care services is very limited in underrepresented countries. A woman's labor can be stretched out if she has been found to be unfaithful to the man that she forced to marry. The child will not be allowed to be born unless the women tells her husband who she has had relations with.\n\nCauses \nThe cause of child marriage is for the family of the child pride to remain good social standing and to have financial prosperity. This tradition is upheld by the families in order to keep their children safe and to prevent their daughter from conceiving children without being married. This idea protects the families pride and honor. Families who do not give their children up for marriage are usually criticized by the neighboring communities and are shown scrutiny. It is easier for the families to follow what everyone else is participating in. Families also marry their children off at a young age to make sure that their daughters have protection and security.\n\nConsequences \n\nThere are many health consequences that spiral from a child giving birth at a young age. Children who are younger than the age of 18 are more likely to die due to aggressive birth whereas an older women will be okay. Young children who deliver babies are subject to diseases and many health related problems that can prevent them from conceiving another child. Furthermore, children who marry at a young age are typically not educated. They cannot use their education as an outlet to get out of abusive relationships. These children grow up taking the inferior role in the household and are forced to obey their husbands. Child brides are sheltered from their community and are not allowed to participate in communal events. Child brides who run away from their husbands are subject to violence in the form of physical beatings, sexual assault, and marriage.\n\nReferences \n\nSouth Sudan\nChildhood in Africa\nSouth Sudanese society",
"Child's slave () is a term used in China to describe parents, especially those born in the 1980s, who are under financial, physical, or mental pressure when raising their children. Parents who are \"child's slaves\" often lose their self-value and sense of purpose because they live and work solely for their children. The children themselves are usually spoiled by their parents' indulgence.\n\nMajor causes\n\nHigh living cost\nThe main reason behind this phenomenon is the rising cost of raising a child, for instance, in housing, food, education and transportation. According to the gynecologists in China, it cost about 40 RMB to give birth in 1980s, while it costs over 4,000 RMB today. However, even more money is spent on education because of the fierce competition in China. These huge expenditures force parents to become \"child's slaves\". Some married couples may develop child phobia from this situation.\n\nOne-child policy\nParents in China can have only one child under one-child policy, which leads to excessive parental expectations. With parents putting all their hopes and dreams on the only child, the parents might over-protect them and materially over-provide them.\n\nPersonal psychological factor\nIn Chinese traditional culture, family is considered as a center of society. This concept remains the same now and the child becomes the center of family. The parents who are \"child's slaves\" are mostly post-80s, who grew up in a special circumstance. As the first generation growing under single child policy, they had no siblings and were the center of family as well. Therefore, they are self-oriented and have difficulty of expressing their emotions. They use materials and money to show their love towards their children. This gives them a heavy burden and makes them become \"child's slave\" eventually.\n\nCharacteristics\n\n Most of them are young parents, born in the 80s\n Put their child as the only center of their life\n Under the great pressure of raising a child \n Spend most of the family income on child irrationally \n Put all their hopes and pay too much attention on child\n Spoil their child and avoid them from suffering\n Give up work and interpersonal activities in order to take care of their child\n\nEffects\n\nEffects on children\nThe child is usually well-taken care of, even spoiled, by his parents. Because the parents prepare every aspect of the child’s life, the child may have low self-care ability and be over-dependent on his parents. However, he gains sufficient supports, both financially and mentally, to focus on his own interests, which may lead to temporary success, but ultimately reduces his ability to face failure.\n\nAdditionally, since the child is spoiled by his parents, he takes parents' love for granted, and may even regard them as servants. This might affect the child’s personality by causing him to develop the so-called prince illness. Moreover, a lack of sense of responsibility slows down the mental maturity of children raised in this manner.\n\nEffects on family\nSince the child is the center of the family, the parents are willing to give up their own life goals in order to focus on the growth of the child. High expectation is imposed to the kid, and it might worsen the relationship between the child and parents due to the severe upbringing\n\nEffects on society\nFor the whole society, a generation of spoilt children does little contribution to social development. They are selfish and lazy, unwilling to work hard.\n\nAging society is another problem. If young couples refuse to give birth because of the fear of becoming \"child's slaves\", the labor force of society will be reduced.\n\nSituation in China\n\"Child's slave\" has become a common situation in modern China. Many young parents, especially those born in the 1980s, are called \"child's slaves\" to describe the heavy burden on them.\n\nMore than 80% of young parents feel great pressure under the burden of raising a child because of high expenses incurred as the child grows up. To ensure their child grow in a better environment, young parents are willing to spend most of their income on them. The common situation of buying expensive imported milk powder is a representation. The average cost for raising up a child from birth to grade six is RMB 450,000, despite the extra spending like traveling or studying abroad. In big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the cost is even much higher.\n\nMoreover, most of these young parents also have other \"name-tags\", including \"mortgage's slave\", \"card's slave\" and \"car's slave\", which indicates how heavy their financial pressure are. It is because of the inflation in China and also their wills of providing a better living environment to their family and child. Apart from the financial pressure, \"Child's slaves\" sacrifice their own life for the child. Some of them give up personal career and shorten their leisure time to take care of the child, or some of them work day and night to earn money for their child.\n\nIn popular culture\n\nTV drama\n \"Child's Slave\"(Chinese: 孩奴) – By CCTV of China in 2012\n “The Sweet Burden” (Chinese:小兒難養) – By Hunan TV World of China in 2013\n “Baby” (Chinese: 寶貝) – By YOUHUG of China in 2013\n\nSee also\nOne-child policy\nHelicopter parent\nParenting styles\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \"Are you are Child's Slave?\" Video (Chinese: 你是孩奴嗎?)\n http://news.cntv.cn/program/yexian/20110919/100072.shtml\n \"Mocking from \"child's slaves\" : Children is luxury goods with continuously spending\" Video (Chinese: \"孩奴\"吐糟：孩子是持續消費的奢侈品)\n http://www.chinanews.com/shipin/2013/01-16/news160144.shtml\n\nSocial issues in China\nChinese slang\nChinese culture"
] |
[
"Julian Assange",
"Personal life",
"Where does Assange live?",
"Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland,",
"Is Assange married?",
"Assange married a woman named Teresa,",
"Did Assange get divorced from Teresa?",
"The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child.",
"Who is their child?",
"they had a son, Daniel Assange,"
] |
C_cfe6fad9a6db45d1a0f1798136a0fb32_1
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Where did Assange go to school?
| 5 |
Where did Assange go to school?
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Julian Assange
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Assange was born in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple had separated before Assange was born. When he was a year old, his mother married Richard Brett Assange, an actor, with whom she ran a small theatre company. They divorced around 1979. Christine Assange then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, a member of Australian cult The Family, with whom she had a son before the couple broke up in 1982. Assange had a nomadic childhood, and had lived in over thirty Australian towns by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne, Victoria. He attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979-1983) and Townsville State High School, as well as being schooled at home. He studied programming, mathematics, and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003-2006), but did not complete a degree. While in his teens, Assange married a woman named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son, Daniel Assange, now a software designer. The couple separated and initially disputed custody of their child. Assange was Daniel's primary caregiver for much of his childhood. In an open letter to French President Francois Hollande, Assange stated his youngest child lives in France with his mother. He also said that his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Julian Paul Assange (; né Hawkins; born 3 July 1971) is an Australian editor, publisher and activist who founded WikiLeaks in 2006. WikiLeaks came to international attention in 2010 when it published a series of leaks provided by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. These leaks included the Baghdad airstrike Collateral Murder video (April 2010), the Afghanistan war logs (July 2010), the Iraq war logs (October 2010), and Cablegate (November 2010). After the 2010 leaks, the United States government launched a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks.
In November 2010, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct. Assange said the allegations were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States over his role in the publication of secret American documents. After losing his battle against extradition to Sweden, he breached bail and took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London in June 2012. He was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012 on the grounds of political persecution, with the presumption that if he were extradited to Sweden, he would be eventually extradited to the US. Swedish prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2019, saying their evidence had "weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed since the events in question."
During the 2016 U.S. election campaign, WikiLeaks published confidential Democratic Party emails, showing that the party's national committee favoured Hillary Clinton over her rival Bernie Sanders in the primaries.
On 11 April 2019, Assange's asylum was withdrawn following a series of disputes with the Ecuadorian authorities. The police were invited into the embassy and he was arrested. He was found guilty of breaching the Bail Act and sentenced to 50 weeks in prison. The United States government unsealed an indictment against Assange related to the leaks provided by Manning. On 23 May 2019, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917. Editors from newspapers, including The Washington Post and The New York Times, as well as press freedom organisations, criticised the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act, characterising it as an attack on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. On 4 January 2021, UK District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled against the United States' request to extradite Assange and stated that doing so would be "oppressive" given concerns over Assange's mental health and risk of suicide. On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail, pending an appeal by the United States. On 10 December 2021, the High Court in London ruled that Assange can be extradited to the US to face the charges.
Assange has been confined in Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London since April 2019.
Early life
Assange was born Julian Paul Hawkins on 3 July 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, to Christine Ann Hawkins (b. 1951), a visual artist, and John Shipton, an anti-war activist and builder. The couple separated before their son was born. When Julian was a year old, his mother married Brett Assange, an actor with whom she ran a small theatre company and whom Julian regards as his father (choosing Assange as his surname). Christine and Brett Assange divorced around 1979. Christine then became involved with Leif Meynell, also known as Leif Hamilton, whom Julian Assange later described as "a member of an Australian cult" called The Family. They separated in 1982.
Julian had a nomadic childhood, living in more than 30 Australian towns and cities by the time he reached his mid-teens, when he settled with his mother and half-brother in Melbourne. Assange attended many schools, including Goolmangar Primary School in New South Wales (1979–1983) and Townsville State High School in Queensland as well as being schooled at home.
In 1987, aged 16, Assange began hacking under the name Mendax, supposedly taken from Horace's splendide mendax (nobly lying). He and two others, known as "Trax" and "Prime Suspect", formed a hacking group they called "the International Subversives". According to David Leigh and Luke Harding, Assange may have been involved in the WANK (Worms Against Nuclear Killers) hack at NASA in 1989, but this has never been proven.
In September 1991, Assange was discovered hacking into the Melbourne master terminal of Nortel, a Canadian multinational telecommunications corporation. The Australian Federal Police tapped Assange's phone line (he was using a modem), raided his home at the end of October and eventually charged him in 1994 with 31 counts of hacking and related crimes. In December 1996, he pleaded guilty to 24 charges (the others were dropped) and was ordered to pay reparations of A$2,100 and released on a good behaviour bond. He received a lenient penalty due to the absence of malicious or mercenary intent and his disrupted childhood.
Assange studied programming, mathematics and physics at Central Queensland University (1994) and the University of Melbourne (2003–2006), but did not complete a degree.
In 1993, Assange used his computing skills to help the Victoria Police Child Exploitation Unit to prosecute individuals responsible for publishing and distributing child pornography. In the same year, he was involved in starting one of the first public Internet service providers in Australia, Suburbia Public Access Network. He began programming in 1994, authoring or co-authoring the TCP port scanner Strobe (1995), patches to the open-source database PostgreSQL (1996), the Usenet caching software NNTPCache (1996), the Rubberhose deniable encryption system (1997) (which reflected his growing interest in cryptography), and Surfraw, a command-line interface for web-based search engines (2000). During this period, he also moderated the AUCRYPTO forum, ran Best of Security, a website "giving advice on computer security" that had 5,000 subscribers in 1996, and contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), a book about Australian hackers, including the International Subversives. In 1998, he co-founded the company Earthmen Technology.
Assange stated that he registered the domain leaks.org in 1999, but "didn't do anything with it". He did publicise a patent granted to the National Security Agency in August 1999, for voice-data harvesting technology: "This patent should worry people. Everyone's overseas phone calls are or may soon be tapped, transcribed and archived in the bowels of an unaccountable foreign spy agency."
Founding WikiLeaks
Early publications
Assange and others established WikiLeaks in 2006. Assange became a member of the organisation's advisory board and described himself as the editor-in-chief. From 2007 to 2010, Assange travelled continuously on WikiLeaks business, visiting Africa, Asia, Europe and North America. During this time, the organisation published internet censorship lists, leaks, and classified media from anonymous sources. These publications including revelations about drone strikes in Yemen, corruption across the Arab world, extrajudicial executions by Kenyan police, 2008 Tibetan unrest in China, and the "Petrogate" oil scandal in Peru.
WikiLeaks' international profile increased in 2008 when a Swiss bank, Julius Baer, failed to block the site's publication of bank records. Assange commented that financial institutions ordinarily "operate outside the rule of law", and received extensive legal support from free-speech and civil rights groups.
In September 2008, during the 2008 United States presidential election campaign, the contents of a Yahoo! account belonging to Sarah Palin (the running mate of Republican presidential nominee John McCain) were posted on WikiLeaks after being hacked into by members of Anonymous. After briefly appearing on a blog, the membership list of the far-right British National Party was posted to WikiLeaks on 18 November 2008.
WikiLeaks released a report disclosing a "serious nuclear accident" at the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2009. According to media reports, the accident may have been the direct result of a cyber-attack at Iran's nuclear program, carried out with the Stuxnet computer worm, a cyber-weapon built jointly by the United States and Israel.
Iraq and Afghan War logs and US diplomatic cables
The material WikiLeaks published between 2006 and 2009 attracted various degrees of international attention, but after it began publishing documents supplied by U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks became a household name.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released the Collateral Murder video, which showed United States soldiers fatally shooting 18 civilians from a helicopter in Iraq, including Reuters journalists Namir Noor-Eldeen and his assistant Saeed Chmagh. Reuters had previously made a request to the US government for the Collateral Murder video under Freedom of Information but had been denied. Assange and others worked for a week to break the U.S. military's encryption of the video.
In October 2010, WikiLeaks published the Iraq War logs, a collection of 391,832 United States Army field reports from the Iraq War covering the period from 2004 to 2009. Assange said that he hoped the publication would "correct some of that attack on the truth that occurred before the war, during the war, and which has continued after the war".
Regarding his own role within WikiLeaks, he said, "We always expect tremendous criticism. It is my role to be the lightning rod... to attract the attacks against the organization for our work, and that is a difficult role. On the other hand, I get undue credit".
Other Manning material published by WikiLeaks included the Afghanistan War logs in July 2010, and the Guantánamo Bay files in April 2011.
WikiLeaks published a quarter of a million U.S. diplomatic cables, known as the "Cablegate" files, in November 2010. WikiLeaks initially worked with established Western media organisations, and later with smaller regional media organisations, while also publishing the cables upon which their reporting was based. The files showed United States espionage against the United Nations and other world leaders, revealed tensions between the U.S. and its allies, and exposed corruption in countries throughout the world as documented by U.S. diplomats, helping to spark the Arab Spring. The Cablegate and Iraq and Afghan War releases impacted diplomacy and public opinion globally, with responses varying by region.
Legal issues
US criminal investigation
After WikiLeaks released the Manning material, United States authorities began investigating WikiLeaks and Assange personally to prosecute them under the Espionage Act of 1917. In November 2010, US Attorney-General Eric Holder said there was "an active, ongoing criminal investigation" into WikiLeaks. It emerged from legal documents leaked over the ensuing months that Assange and others were being investigated by a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.
In August 2011, WikiLeaks volunteer Sigurdur Thordarson, working in his home country Iceland, contacted the FBI and, after presenting a copy of Assange's passport at the American embassy, became the first informant to work for the FBI from inside WikiLeaks. In November 2011, WikiLeaks dismissed Thordarson due to what the organization said was his embezzlement of $50,000, to which charge (along with several other offences) he later pleaded guilty in an Icelandic court. According to Thordarson, a few months after his dismissal by WikiLeaks the FBI agreed to pay him $5,000 as compensation for work missed while meeting with agents.
In December 2011, prosecutors in the Chelsea Manning case revealed the existence of chat logs between Manning and an interlocutor they claimed was Assange. Assange said that WikiLeaks has no way of knowing the identity of its sources and that chats with sources, including user-names, were anonymous. In January 2011, Assange described the allegation that WikiLeaks had conspired with Manning as "absolute nonsense". The logs were presented as evidence during Manning's court-martial in June–July 2013. The prosecution argued that they showed WikiLeaks helping Manning reverse-engineer a password. During her trial, Manning said she acted on her own to send documents to WikiLeaks and no one associated with WikiLeaks pressured her into giving more information.
In 2013, US officials said that it was unlikely that the Justice Department would indict Assange for publishing classified documents because it would also have to prosecute the news organisations and writers who published classified material.
In June 2013, The New York Times said that court and other documents suggested that Assange was being examined by a grand jury and "several government agencies", including by the FBI. Court documents published in May 2014 suggest that Assange was under "active and ongoing" investigation at that time.
Some Snowden documents published in 2014 showed that the U.S. government had put Assange on its 2010 "Manhunting Timeline", an annual account of efforts to capture or kill alleged terrorists and others, and in the same period urged allies to open criminal investigations into Assange. In the same documents, there was a proposal by the National Security Agency (NSA) to designate WikiLeaks a "malicious foreign actor", thus increasing the surveillance against it.
In January 2015, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying that three members of the organisation had received notice from Google that Google had complied with a federal warrant by a US District Court to turn over their emails and metadata on 5 April 2012. In July 2015, Assange called himself a "wanted journalist" in an open letter to the French president published in Le Monde. In a December 2015 court submission, the US government confirmed its "sensitive, ongoing law enforcement proceeding into the Wikileaks matter".
Under the Obama Administration, the Department of Justice did not indict Assange because it was unable to find any evidence that his actions differed from those of a journalist. However, after President Donald Trump took office, CIA director Mike Pompeo and Attorney General Jeff Sessions stepped up pursuit of Assange.
In April 2017, US officials were preparing to file formal charges against Assange. Legal scholar Steve Vladeck said prosecutors accelerated the case in 2019 due to the impending statute of limitations on Assange's largest leaks.
Swedish sexual assault allegations
Assange visited Sweden in August 2010. During his visit, he became the subject of sexual assault allegations from two women. Assange denied the allegations and said he was happy to face questions in Britain.
On 20 November 2010, the Swedish police issued an international arrest warrant. Later that day, Assange told journalist Raffi Khatchadourian that Sweden has a "very, very poor judicial system" and a culture of "crazed radical feminist ideology". He commented that, more importantly, his case involved international politics, and that "Sweden is a U.S. satrapy." In a later interview he described Sweden as "the Saudi Arabia of feminism." On 8 December 2010, Assange gave himself up to British police and attended his first extradition hearing, where he was remanded in custody. On 16 December 2010, at the second hearing, he was granted bail by the High Court of Justice and released after his supporters paid £240,000 in cash and sureties. A further hearing on 24 February 2011 ruled that Assange should be extradited to Sweden. This decision was upheld by the High Court on 2 November and by the Supreme Court on 30 May the next year.
After previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in 2013. Her letter advised that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.
In March 2015, after public criticism from other Swedish law practitioners, Ny changed her mind about interrogating Assange, who had taken refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. These interviews, which began on 14 November 2016, involved the British police, Swedish prosecutors and Ecuadorian officials, and were eventually published online. By that time, the statute of limitations had expired on all three of the less serious allegations. Since the Swedish prosecutor had not interviewed Assange by 18 August 2015, the questioning pertained only to the open investigation of "lesser degree rape".
On 19 May 2017, the Swedish authorities suspended their investigation, saying they could not expect the Ecuadorian Embassy to communicate reliably with Assange with respect to the case. Chief prosecutor Marianne Ny officially revoked his arrest warrant, but said the investigation could still be resumed if Assange visited Sweden before August 2020.
Following Assange's arrest on 11 April 2019, the case was reopened, in May 2019, under prosecutor Eva-Marie Persson. On 19 November, she announced that she had discontinued her investigation, saying that the evidence was not strong enough. She added that although she was confident in the complainant, "the evidence has weakened considerably due to the long period of time that has elapsed".
Ecuadorian embassy period
Entering the embassy
On 19 June 2012, the Ecuadorian foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced that Assange had applied for political asylum, that the Ecuadorian government was considering his request, and that Assange was at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but said that the Swedish allegations were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.
British Foreign Secretary William Hague gave a news conference in response. He said "We will not allow Mr Assange safe passage out of the United Kingdom, nor is there any legal basis for us to do so," whilst adding, "The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum."
Assange breached his bail conditions by taking up residence in the embassy rather than appearing in court, and faced arrest if he left. Assange's supporters, including journalist Jemima Goldsmith, journalist John Pilger, and filmmaker Ken Loach, forfeited £200,000 in bail. Goldsmith said she was surprised at his asylum bid and had expected him to face the Swedish allegations.
The UK government wrote Patiño that the police were entitled to enter the embassy and arrest Assange under UK law. Patiño said it was an implied threat, stating that "such actions would be a blatant disregard of the Vienna Convention". Officers of the Metropolitan Police Service were stationed outside the embassy from June 2012 to October 2015 to arrest Assange if he left the embassy, and compel him to attend the extradition appeal hearing. The police officers were withdrawn on grounds of cost in October 2015, but the police said they would still deploy "several overt and covert tactics to arrest him". The Metropolitan Police Service said the cost of the policing for the period was £12.6million.
WikiLeaks insiders stated that Assange decided to seek asylum because he felt abandoned by the Australian government. The Australian attorney-general, Nicola Roxon, had written to Assange's lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, saying that Australia would not seek to involve itself in any international exchanges about Assange's future. She suggested that if Assange was imprisoned in the US, he could apply for an international prisoner transfer to Australia. Assange's lawyers described the letter as a "declaration of abandonment".
On 16 August 2012, Patiño announced that Ecuador was granting Assange political asylum because of the threat represented by the United States secret investigation against him. In its formal statement, Ecuador said that "as a consequence of Assange's determined defense to freedom of expression and freedom of press... in any given moment, a situation may come where his life, safety or personal integrity will be in danger". Latin American states expressed support for Ecuador. Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa confirmed on 18 August that Assange could stay at the embassy indefinitely, and the following day Assange gave his first speech from the balcony. An office converted into a studio apartment, equipped with a bed, telephone, sun lamp, computer, shower, treadmill, and kitchenette, became his home until 11 April 2019.
WikiLeaks publishing
On 24 April 2011, WikiLeaks began publishing the Guantanamo Bay files leak, 779 classified reports on prisoners, past and present, held by the U.S. at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. The documents, dated from 2002 to 2008, revealed prisoners, some of whom were coerced to confess, included children, the elderly and mentally disabled.
In July 2012, WikiLeaks began publishing the Syria Files, a collection of more than two million emails from Syrian political figures, government ministries and companies. Assange said the "Syria Files" collection
In 2013, Assange analysed the Kissinger cables held at the US National Archives and released them in searchable form.
By 2015, WikiLeaks had published more than ten million documents and associated analyses, and was described by Assange as "a giant library of the world's most persecuted documents".
In June 2015, WikiLeaks began publishing confidential and secret Saudi Arabian government documents.
On 25 November 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and internal documents that provided details on U.S. military operations in Yemen from 2009 to March 2015. In a statement accompanying the release of the "Yemen Files", Assange said about the U.S. involvement in the Yemen war: "The war in Yemen has produced 3.15million internally displaced persons. Although the United States government has provided most of the bombs and is deeply involved in the conduct of the war itself, reportage on the war in English is conspicuously rare."
In December 2016, WikiLeaks published emails from the Turkish government in response to Erdoğan's post-coup purges in Turkey. The emails covered the period from 2010 to July 2016. In response, Turkey blocked access to the WikiLeaks site.
Public positions
WikiLeaks Party
Assange stood for the Australian Senate in the 2013 Australian federal election for the newly formed WikiLeaks Party but failed to win a seat. The party experienced internal dissent over its governance and electoral tactics and was deregistered due to low membership numbers in 2015.
Edward Snowden
In 2013, Assange and others in WikiLeaks helped whistleblower Edward Snowden flee from US law enforcement. After the United States cancelled Snowden's passport, stranding him in Russia, they considered transporting him to Latin America on the presidential jet of a sympathetic Latin American leader. In order to throw the US off the scent, they spoke about the jet of the Bolivian president Evo Morales, instead of the jet they were considering. In July 2013, Morales's jet was forced to land in Austria after the US pressured Italy, France, and Spain to deny the jet access to their airspace over false rumours Snowden was on board. Assange said the grounding "reveals the true nature of the relationship between Western Europe and the United States" as "a phone call from U.S. intelligence was enough to close the airspace to a booked presidential flight, which has immunity". Assange advised Snowden that he would be safest in Russia which was better able to protect its borders than Venezuela, Brazil or Ecuador. In 2015, Maria Luisa Ramos, the Bolivian ambassador to Russia, accused Assange of putting Morales' life at risk. Assange stated that he regretted what happened but that "[w]e can't predict that other countries engage in some... unprecedented criminal operation".
Operation Speargun
Documents provided by Edward Snowden showed that in 2012 and 2013 the NZ government worked to establish a secret mass surveillance programme which it called "Operation Speargun". On 15 September 2014, Assange appeared via remote video link on Kim Dotcom's Moment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, which discussed the programme. Assange said the Snowden documents showed that he had been a target of the programme and that "Operation Speargun" represented "an extreme, bizarre, Orwellian future that is being constructed secretly in New Zealand".
On 3 July 2015, Paris newspaper Le Monde published an open letter from Assange to French President François Hollande in which Assange urged the French government to grant him refugee status. In response to this letter, Hollande said: "France cannot act on his request. The situation of Mr Assange does not present an immediate danger."
Other developments
In 2015, La Repubblica stated that it had evidence of the UK's role via the English Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in creating the "legal and diplomatic quagmire" which prevented Assange from leaving the Ecuadorian embassy. La Repubblica sued the CPS in 2017 to obtain further information but its case was rejected with the judge saying "the need for the British authorities to protect the confidentiality of the extradition process outweighs the public interest of the press to know". A further appeal was rejected in September 2019.
On 5 February 2016, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that Assange had been subject to arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish Governments since 7 December 2010, including his time in prison, on conditional bail and in the Ecuadorian embassy. The Working Group said Assange should be allowed to walk free and be given compensation. The UK and Swedish governments denied the charge of detaining Assange arbitrarily. The UK Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, said the charge was "ridiculous" and that the group was "made up of lay people", and called Assange a "fugitive from justice" who "can come out any time he chooses", and called the panel's ruling "flawed in law". Swedish prosecutors called the group's charge irrelevant. The UK said it would arrest Assange should he leave the embassy. Mark Ellis, executive director of the International Bar Association, stated that the finding is "not binding on British law". US legal scholar Noah Feldman described the Working Group's conclusion as astonishing, summarising it as "Assange might be charged with a crime in the US. Ecuador thinks charging him with violating national security law would amount to 'political persecution' or worse. Therefore, Sweden must give up on its claims to try him for rape, and Britain must ignore the Swedes' arrest warrant and let him leave the country."
In September 2016 and again on 12 January 2017, WikiLeaks tweeted that Assange would agree to US prison in exchange for President Obama granting Chelsea Manning clemency. After commuting Manning's sentence on 17 January 2017, Obama stated that Assange's offer had not been a consideration.
On 19 May 2017, Assange emerged on the embassy's balcony and told a crowd that, despite no longer facing a Swedish sex investigation, he would remain inside the embassy to avoid extradition to the United States.
2016 U.S. presidential election
During the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries, WikiLeaks hosted a searchable database of emails sent or received by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. The emails had been released by the US State Department under a Freedom of information request in February 2016. The emails were a major point of discussion during the presidential election and prompted an FBI investigation of Clinton for using a private email server for classified documents while she was US Secretary of State.
In February 2016, Assange wrote: "I have had years of experience in dealing with Hillary Clinton and have read thousands of her cables. Hillary lacks judgment and will push the United States into endless, stupid wars which spread terrorism. ...she certainly should not become president of the United States." On 25 July, following the Republican National Convention, Assange said that choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is like choosing between cholera or gonorrhoea. "Personally, I would prefer neither." In an Election Day statement, Assange criticised both Clinton and Trump, saying that "The Democratic and Republican candidates have both expressed hostility towards whistleblowers."
On 22 July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) in which the DNC seemingly presented ways of undercutting Clinton's competitor Bernie Sanders and showed apparent favouritism towards Clinton. The release led to the resignation of DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and an apology to Sanders from the DNC. The New York Times wrote that Assange had timed the release to coincide with the 2016 Democratic National Convention because he believed Clinton had pushed for his indictment and he regarded her as a "liberal war hawk".
On 7 October Assange posted a press release on WikiLeaks exposing a second batch of emails with over 2,000 mails from Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
In mid-October, the Ecuadorian government severed Assange's Internet connection because of the leaks. In December, Assange said the connection had been restored.
Cybersecurity experts attributed the attack to the Russian government. The Central Intelligence Agency, together with several other agencies, concluded that Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC servers, as well as Podesta's email account, and provided the information to WikiLeaks to bolster Trump's election campaign. As a result of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, 12 Russian GRU military intelligence agents were indicted on 13 July 2018 for the attack on the DNC mail-server. According to the Mueller report, this group shared these mails using the pseudonym Guccifer 2.0 with WikiLeaks and other entities. The investigation also unearthed communications between Guccifer 2.0, WikiLeaks and the Trump campaign, in which they coordinated the release of the material. The Senate Intelligence Committee reported that "WikiLeaks actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian intelligence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort."
In interviews, Assange repeatedly said that the Russian government was not the source of the DNC and Podesta emails, and accused the Clinton campaign of "a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria" about Russian involvement. On the eve of the election, Assange addressed the criticism he had received for publishing Clinton material, saying that WikiLeaks publishes "material given to us if it is of political, diplomatic, historical or ethical importance and which has not been published elsewhere," that it had never received any information on Trump, Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson's campaign.
A 2017 article in Foreign Policy said that WikiLeaks turned down leaks on the Russian government, focusing instead on hacks relating to the US presidential election. WikiLeaks said that, as far as it could recall, the material was already public.
In April 2018, the DNC sued WikiLeaks for the theft of the DNC's information under various Virginia and US federal statutes. It accused WikiLeaks and Russia of a "brazen attack on American democracy". The Committee to Protect Journalists said that the lawsuit raised several important press freedom questions. The suit was dismissed with prejudice in July 2019. Judge John Koeltl said that WikiLeaks "did not participate in any wrongdoing in obtaining the materials in the first place" and were therefore within the law in publishing the information.
Seth Rich
In a July 2016 interview on Dutch television, Assange hinted that DNC staffer Seth Rich was the source of the DNC emails and that Rich had been killed as a result. Seeking clarification, the interviewer asked Assange whether Rich's killing was "simply a murder," to which Assange answered, "No. There's no finding. So, I'm suggesting that our sources take risks, and they become concerned to see things occurring like that." WikiLeaks offered a $20,000 reward for information about his murder and wrote: "We treat threats toward any suspected source of WikiLeaks with extreme gravity. This should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source to WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder is connected to our publications."
Assange's comments were highlighted by Fox News, The Washington Times and conspiracy website InfoWars and set off a spike in attention to the murder. Assange's statements lent credibility and visibility to what had at that point been a conspiracy theory in the fringe parts of the Internet. According to the Mueller investigation, Assange "implied falsely" that Rich was the source to obscure the fact that Russia was the source. Assange received the emails when Rich was already dead and continued to confer with the Russian hackers to coordinate the release of the material.
Later years in the embassy
In March 2017, WikiLeaks began releasing the largest leak of CIA documents in history, codenamed Vault 7. The documents included details of the CIA's hacking capabilities and software tools used to break into smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. In April, CIA director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks "a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia". Assange accused the CIA of trying to "subvert" his right to freedom of speech. According to former intelligence officials, in the wake of the Vault7 leaks, the CIA plotted to kidnap Assange from Ecuador's London embassy, and some senior officials discussed his potential assassination. Yahoo! News found "no indication that the most extreme measures targeting Assange were ever approved." Some of its sources stated that they had alerted House and Senate intelligence committees to the plans that Pompeo was suggesting. In October 2021, Assange's lawyers introduced the alleged plot during a hearing of the High Court of Justice in London as it considered the U.S. appeal of a lower court's ruling that Assange could not be extradited to face charges in the U.S.
On 6 June 2017, Assange tweeted his support for NSA leaker Reality Winner, who had been arrested three days earlier. Winner had been identified in part because a reporter from The Intercept showed a leaked document to the government without removing possibly incriminating evidence about its leaker. WikiLeaks later offered a $10,000 reward for information about the reporter responsible.
On 16 August 2017, US Republican congressman Dana Rohrabacher visited Assange and told him that Trump would pardon him on condition that he said Russia was not involved in the 2016 Democratic National Committee email leaks. At his extradition hearings in 2020, Assange's lawyers told the court that Rohrabacher had said the offer was made "on instructions from the president". Trump and Rohrabacher said they had never spoken about the offer and Rohrabacher said he had made the offer on his own initiative.
In August 2017, in the midst of the Qatar diplomatic crisis, Dubai-based Al Arabiya said Assange had refrained from publishing two cables about Qatar after negotiations between WikiLeaks and Qatar. Assange said Al Arabiya had been publishing "increasingly absurd fabrications" during the dispute. In September 2017, Assange released "Spy Files Russia," revealing "how a St. Petersburg-based technology company called Peter-Service helped Russian state entities gather detailed data on Russian cellphone users, part of a national system of online surveillance called System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM)." According to Moscow-based journalist Fred Weir, "experts say it casts a timely spotlight on the vast surveillance operations mounted by Russian security services."
Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship in December 2017.
In February 2018, after Sweden had suspended its investigation, Assange brought two legal actions, arguing that Britain should drop its arrest warrant for him as it was "no longer right or proportionate to pursue him" and the arrest warrant for breaching bail had lost its "purpose and its function". In both cases, Senior District Judge Emma Arbuthnot ruled that the arrest warrant should remain in place.
In March 2018, Assange used social media to criticise Germany's arrest of Catalonian separatist leader Carles Puigdemont. On 28 March 2018, Ecuador responded by cutting Assange's internet connection because his social media posts put at risk Ecuador's relations with European nations. In May 2018, The Guardian reported that over five years Ecuador had spent at least $5million (£3.7m) to protect Assange, employing a security company and undercover agents to monitor his visitors, embassy staff and the British police. Ecuador reportedly also devised plans to help Assange escape should British police forcibly enter the embassy to seize him. The Guardian reported that by 2014 Assange had compromised the embassy's communications system. WikiLeaks described the allegation as "an anonymous libel aligned with the current UK-US government onslaught against Mr Assange". In July 2018, President Moreno said that he wanted Assange out of the embassy provided that Assange's life was not in danger. By October 2018, Assange's communications were partially restored.
On 16 October 2018, congressmen from the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs wrote an open letter to President Moreno which described Assange as a dangerous criminal and stated that progress between the US and Ecuador in the areas of economic cooperation, counter-narcotics assistance and the return of a USAID mission to Ecuador depended on Assange being handed over to the authorities.
In October 2018, Assange sued the government of Ecuador for violating his "fundamental rights and freedoms" by threatening to remove his protection and cut off his access to the outside world, refusing him visits from journalists and human rights organisations and installing signal jammers to prevent phone calls and internet access. An Ecuadorian judge ruled against him, saying that requiring Assange to pay for his Internet use and clean up after his cat did not violate his right to asylum.
In November 2018, Pamela Anderson, a close friend and regular visitor of Assange, gave an interview in which she asked the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, to defend Assange. Morrison rejected the request with a response Anderson considered "smutty". Anderson responded that "[r]ather than making lewd suggestions about me, perhaps you should instead think about what you are going to say to millions of Australians when one of their own is marched in an orange jumpsuit to Guantanamo Bay – for publishing the truth. You can prevent this."
On 21 December 2018, the UN's Working Group on Arbitrary Detention urged the UK to let Assange leave the embassy freely. In a statement, the organisation said that the "Swedish investigations have been closed for over 18 months now, and the only ground remaining for Mr Assange's continued deprivation of liberty is a bail violation in the UK, which is, objectively, a minor offence that cannot post-facto justify the more than six years' confinement that he has been subjected to".
In February 2019, the parliament of Geneva passed a motion demanding that the Swiss government extend asylum to Assange. In January 2020, the Catalan Dignity Commission awarded Assange its 2019 Dignity Prize for supporting the Catalan people during the 2017 Catalan independence referendum.
In March 2019, Assange submitted a complaint to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights asking the Ecuadorian government to "ease the conditions that it had imposed on his residence" at the embassy and to protect him from extradition to the US. It also requested US prosecutors unseal criminal charges that had been filed against him. Assange said the Ecuadorian embassy was trying to end his asylum by spying on him and restricting his visitors. The commission rejected his complaint.
Surveillance of Assange in the embassy
On 10 April 2019, WikiLeaks said it had uncovered an extensive surveillance operation against Assange from within the embassy. WikiLeaks said that "material including video, audio, copies of private legal documents and a medical report" had surfaced in Spain and that unnamed individuals in Madrid had made an extortion attempt.
On 26 September 2019, the Spanish newspaper El País reported that the Spanish defence and security company Undercover Global S.L. (UC Global) had spied on Assange for the CIA during his time in the embassy. UC Global had been contracted to protect the embassy during this time. According to the report UC Global's owner David Morales had provided the CIA with audio and video of meetings Assange held with his lawyers and colleagues. Morales also arranged for the US to have direct access to the stream from video cameras installed in the embassy at the beginning of December 2017. The evidence was part of a secret investigation by Spain's High Court, the Audiencia Nacional, into Morales and his relationship with US intelligence. The investigation was precipitated by a complaint by Assange that accused UC Global of violating his privacy and client-attorney privileges as well as committing misappropriation, bribery and money laundering.
Morales was arrested in September on charges involving violations of privacy and client-attorney privileges, as well as misappropriation, bribery, money laundering and criminal possession of weapons. He was released on bail. On 25 September, Spanish Judge José de la Mata sent British authorities a European Investigation Order (EIO) asking for permission to question Assange by videoconference as a witness in the case against Morales. The United Kingdom Central Authority (UKCA), which is in charge of processing and responding to EIOs in the UK, provisionally denied De la Mata's request to question Assange, raised a number of objections to the request, and asked for more details. De la Mata responded to UKCA's objections on 14 October by stating that Assange was the victim who had filed the complaint and that unlawful disclosure of secrets and bribery are also crimes in the UK. He said that the crimes were partially committed on Spanish territory because the microphones used to spy on Assange were bought in Spain, and the information obtained was sent and uploaded to servers at UC Global S. L.'s headquarters in Spain.
Spanish judicial bodies were upset at having their EIO request denied by UKCA and believed the British justice system is concerned by the effect the Spanish case may have on the process to extradite Assange to the US.
In a November 2019 article, Stefania Maurizi said she had access to some of the videos, audios and photos showing a medical examination of Assange, a meeting between Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff, a meeting between Assange, Glenn Greenwald and David Miranda and lunch between Assange and British rapper M.I.A. Microphones had been placed in the women's toilets to capture meetings between Assange and his lawyers. Phones belonging to some of the embassy's visitors were compromised. Spanish lawyer Aitor Martinez, who is part of Assange's legal team, said videos were taken of meetings between Assange and his legal defence team. Maurizi concluded that, based on statements from former employees of UC Global, internal UC Global emails and the type of information collected, it was clear that the surveillance was conducted on behalf of the US government and the information gathered would be used by the US to assist in its case for extraditing Assange.
Britain agreed to allow Judge De la Mata to interview Assange via video link on 20 December. According to his lawyer, Assange testified that he was unaware that cameras installed by Undercover Global were also capturing audio and suggested the surveillance likely targeted his legal team.
Imprisonment and extradition proceedings
Arrest in the embassy
On 2 April 2019, Ecuador's president Moreno said that Assange had violated the terms of his asylum, after photos surfaced on the internet linking Moreno to a corruption scandal. WikiLeaks said it had acquired none of the published material, and that it merely reported on a corruption investigation against Moreno by Ecuador's legislature. WikiLeaks reported a source within the Ecuadorian government saying that, due to the controversy, an agreement had been reached to expel Assange from the embassy and place him in the custody of UK police. According to Assange's father, the revoking of Assange's asylum was connected to an upcoming decision by the International Monetary Fund to grant Ecuador a loan, an assertion also made by critics of Moreno, such as former Ecuadorian foreign minister Guillaume Long.
On 11 April 2019 the Ecuadorian government invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy, and they arrested Assange on the basis of a US extradition warrant. Moreno stated that Ecuador withdrew Assange's asylum after he interfered in Ecuador's domestic affairs, calling Assange a "miserable hacker". British foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt and prime minister Theresa May applauded Moreno's actions, while Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, said the arrest "has got nothing to do with [Australia], it is a matter for the US". United Nations Special Rapporteur Agnès Callamard said that British authorities had arbitrarily detained Assange and further endangered his life by their actions.
Conviction for breach of bail
On the day of his arrest, Assange was charged with breaching the Bail Act 1976 and was found guilty after a short hearing. Assange's defence said chief magistrate Emma Arbuthnot, who had dealt with his case, was biased against him as her husband was directly affected by WikiLeaks' allegations. Judge Michael Snow said it was "unacceptable" to air the claim in front of a "packed press gallery" and that Assange was "a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest" and he had "not come close to establishing reasonable excuse".
Assange was remanded to Belmarsh Prison, and on 1 May 2019 was sentenced to 50 weeks imprisonment. The judge said he would be released after serving half of his sentence, subject to other proceedings and conditional upon committing no further offences. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said that the verdict contravened "principles of necessity and proportionality" for what it considered a "minor violation". Assange appealed his sentence, but dropped his appeal in July.
Espionage indictment in the United States
In 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange. In November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed the indictment.
In February 2019, Chelsea Manning was subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in Virginia in the case. When Manning condemned the secrecy of the hearings and refused to testify, she was jailed for contempt of court on 8 March 2019. On 16 May 2019, Manning refused to testify before a new grand jury investigating Assange, stating that she "believe[d] this grand jury seeks to undermine the integrity of public discourse with the aim of punishing those who expose any serious, ongoing, and systemic abuses of power by this government". She was returned to jail for the 18-month term of the grand jury with financial penalties. In June 2021, Chelsea Manning said her grand jury resistance was not contingent on Julian Assange being the target, and that she was not even sure he was. "I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury—if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case."
On 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e., hacking into a government computer), which carries a maximum five-year sentence. The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.
On 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. These charges carried a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act, but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks also without government authorisation. It said it was not clear how WikiLeaks' publications were legally different from other publications of classified information.
Most cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges, however, did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped in 2009.
The Associated Press reported that the indictment raised concerns about media freedom, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is a routine job journalists perform. Steve Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial if Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.
While some American politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-government organisations for press freedom condemned it. Mark Warner, vice chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said that Assange was "a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security". Several jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest would "set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future". Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is "a major threat to global media freedom". United Nations human rights expert Agnes Callamard said the indictment exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations. Ben Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union said that prosecuting Assange "for violating US secrecy laws would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest".
Imprisonment in the UK
Since his arrest on 11 April 2019, Assange has been incarcerated in Belmarsh Prison in London.
After examining Assange on 9 May 2019, Nils Melzer, the United Nations special rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, concluded that "in addition to physical ailments, Mr Assange showed all symptoms typical for prolonged exposure to psychological torture, including extreme stress, chronic anxiety and intense psychological trauma." The British government said it disagreed with some of his observations. In a later interview, Melzer criticised the "secretive grand jury indictment in the United States", the "abusive manner in which Swedish prosecutors disseminated, re-cycled and perpetuated their 'preliminary investigation' into alleged sexual offences", the "termination by Ecuador of Mr Assange's asylum status and citizenship without any form of due process", and the "overt bias against Mr Assange being shown by British judges since his arrest". He said the United States, UK, Sweden and Ecuador were trying to make an example of Assange. He also accused journalists of "spreading abusive and deliberately distorted narratives". Shortly after Melzer's visit, Assange was transferred to the prison's health care unit.
On 13 September 2019, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released on 22 September when his prison term ended because he was a and his lawyer had not applied for bail. She said when his sentence came to an end, his status would change from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition.
On 1 November 2019, Melzer said that Assange's health had continued to deteriorate and his life was now at risk. He said that the UK government had not acted on the issue.
On 22 November, an open letter to the UK Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary signed by a group of medical practitioners named Doctors for Assange said Assange's health was declining to such an extent that he could die in prison. Subsequent attempts by the group, made to the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice Robert Buckland, and to Marise Payne, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, also yielded no result.
On 30 December 2019, Melzer accused the UK government of torturing Julian Assange. He said Assange's "continued exposure to severe mental and emotional suffering... clearly amounts to psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."
On 17 February 2020, the medical journal The Lancet published an open letter from Doctors for Assange in which they said Assange was in a "dire state of health due to the effects of prolonged psychological torture in both the Ecuadorian embassy and Belmarsh prison" which could lead to his death and that his "politically motivated medical neglect... sets a dangerous precedent". On the same day, Reporters Without Borders posted a separate petition which accused the Trump administration of acting in "retaliation for (Assange's) facilitating major revelations in the international media about the way the United States conducted its wars". The petition said, Assange's publications "were clearly in the public interest and not espionage". Australian MPs Andrew Wilkie and George Christensen visited Assange and pressed the UK and Australian governments to intervene to stop his being extradited.
On 25 March 2020, Assange was denied bail after Judge Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his imprisonment would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19. She said Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition. In November 2021, his father told a French interview program that Assange had received a non-mandatory COVID-19 vaccination in Belmarsh Prison.
On 25 June 2020, Doctors for Assange published another letter in The Lancet, "reiterating their demand to end the torture and medical neglect of Julian Assange", in which they state their "professional and ethical duty to speak out against, report, and stop torture".
In September 2020, an open letter in support of Assange was sent to Boris Johnson with the signatures of two current heads of state and approximately 160 other politicians. The following month, U.S. Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Republican, introduced a resolution opposing the extradition of Assange. In December 2020, German human rights commissioner Bärbel Kofler cautioned the UK about the need to consider Assange's physical and mental health before deciding whether to extradite him.
Hearings on extradition to the U.S.
On 2 May 2019, the first hearing was held in London into the U.S. request for Assange's extradition. When asked by Judge Snow whether he consented to extradition, Assange replied, "I do not wish to surrender myself for extradition for doing journalism that has won many, many awards and protected many people". On 13 June, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid said he had signed the extradition order.
Towards the end of 2019, Judge Emma Arbuthnot, who had presided at several of the extradition hearings, stepped aside because of a "perception of bias". Vanessa Baraitser was appointed as the presiding judge.
On 21 October 2019, Assange appeared at the court for a case management hearing. When Judge Baraitser asked about his understanding of the proceedings, Assange replied:
In February 2020, the court heard legal arguments. Assange's lawyers contended that he had been charged with political offences and therefore could not be extradited. The hearings were delayed for months due to requests for extra time from the prosecution and the defence and due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, the International Bar Association's Human Rights Institute, IBAHRI, condemned the mistreatment of Julian Assange in the extradition trial.
Assange appeared in court on 7 September 2020, facing a new indictment with 18 counts:
Conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information;
Conspiracy to commit computer intrusions;
Obtaining national defence information (seven counts); and
Disclosure of national defence information (nine counts).
The US Department of Justice stated that the new indictment "broaden[s] the scope of... alleged computer intrusions", alleging that Assange "communicated directly with a leader of the hacking group LulzSec[,]... provided a list of targets for LulzSec to hack" and "[conspired] with Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password hash". Judge Baraitser denied motions by Assange's barristers to dismiss the new charges or to adjourn in order to better respond.
Some witnesses who testified in September, such as Daniel Ellsberg, did so remotely via video link due to COVID-19 restrictions. Technical problems caused extensive delays. Amnesty International, PEN Norway, and eight members of the European Parliament had their access to the livestream revoked. Baraitser responded that the initial invitations had been sent in error. Torture victim Khaled el-Masri, who was originally requested as a defence witness, had his testimony reduced to a written statement. Other witnesses testified that the conditions of imprisonment, which would be likely to worsen upon extradition to the U.S., placed Assange at a high risk of depression and suicide which was exacerbated by his Asperger syndrome. During the court proceedings the defence drew attention to a prison service report stating that a hidden razor blade had been found by a prison officer during a search of Assange's cell. During the proceedings it was also revealed that Assange had contacted the Samaritans phone service on numerous occasions.
Patrick Eller, a former forensics examiner with the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command, testified that Assange did not crack and could not have cracked the password mentioned in the U.S. indictment, as Chelsea Manning had intentionally sent only a portion of the password's hash. Moreover, Eller stated that password cracking was a common topic of discussion among other soldiers stationed at Forward Operating Base Hammer, suggesting that Manning's message was unrelated to the classified documents which were already in her possession. Testimony on 30 September revealed new allegations surrounding the surveillance of the Ecuadorian embassy by UC Global. A former UC Global employee, who spoke anonymously fearing reprisals, stated that the firm undertook "an increasingly sophisticated operation" after it was put into contact with the Trump administration by Sheldon Adelson. According to the employee, intelligence agents discussed plans to break into the embassy to kidnap or poison Assange and attempted to obtain the DNA of a baby who was believed to be Assange's child.
To coincide with the end of the hearing, Progressive International convened a virtual event called the Belmarsh Tribunal, modelled after the Russell Tribunal, to scrutinise what it calls "the crimes that have been revealed by Assange, and the crimes that have been committed against him, in turn".
Hearings, including a statement in support of the defence by Noam Chomsky, concluded on 1 October 2020.
On 4 January 2021, Judge Baraitser ruled that Assange could not be extradited to the United States, citing concerns about his mental health and the risk of suicide in a US prison. She sided with the US on every other point, including whether the charges constituted political offences and whether he was entitled to freedom of speech protections.
Appeal and other developments
On 6 January 2021, Assange was denied bail on the grounds that he was a flight risk, pending an appeal by the United States. The US prosecutors lodged an appeal of the denial of extradition on 15 January.
Following the decision by Judge Baraitser that it would be "oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States," in July 2021 the Biden administration assured the Crown Prosecution Services that "Mr Assange will not be subject to SAMs or imprisoned at ADX (unless he were to do something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX)". The United States also assured that it "will consent to Mr Assange being transferred to Australia to serve any custodial sentence imposed on him." An Amnesty International expert on national security and human rights in Europe said, "Those are not assurances at all. It's not that difficult to look at those assurances and say: these are inherently unreliable, it promises to do something and then reserves the right to break the promise".
In June 2021 Icelandic newspaper Stundin published details of an interview with Sigurdur Ingi Thordarson, the witness identified as "Teenager" in the U.S. Justice Department's case against Assange. In the interview Thordarson, who had received a promise of immunity from prosecution in return for co-operating with the FBI, stated he had fabricated allegations used in the U.S. indictment.
In June 2021, Julian Assange's half brother Gabriel Shipton and father John Shipton left Australia to conduct a month-long 17 city tour of the United States to generate awareness and support for Assange and press freedom. In a Saint Paul, Minnesota event, sponsored by Women Against Military Madness, the Shiptons asked supporters to appeal to members of Congress to weigh in with the Justice Department to reconsider its prosecution. Ecuador revoked Assange's citizenship in July 2021.
In August 2021 in the High Court, Lord Justice Holroyde decided that Judge Baraitser may have given too much weight to what Holroyde called "a misleading report" by an expert witness for the defence, psychiatrist Prof Michael Kopelman, and granted permission for the contested risk of suicide to be raised on the appeal.
In October 2021, the High Court held a two-day appeal hearing presided over by Ian Burnett, Baron Burnett of Maldon, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, and Lord Justice Holroyde. In opening the U.S. as appellant argued that Assange's health issues were less severe than claimed during the initial extradition hearing and that his depression was moderate rather than severe. They also drew attention to binding assurances given by the U.S. concerning his proposed treatment in custody. In answer Assange's defence drew attention to a Yahoo! News report that the CIA had plotted to poison, abduct or assassinate Assange. Edward Fitzgerald QC argued: "Given the revelations of surveillance in the embassy and plots to kill [Assange]," "there are great grounds for fearing what will be done to him" if extradited to the U.S. He urged the court "not to trust [the] assurances" of the "same government" alleged to have plotted Assange's killing. According to his partner Stella Moris, Assange suffered a mini-stroke on 27 October while sitting through the court hearing and was subsequently given anti-stroke medication.
On 10 December 2021, the High Court ruled in favour of the United States. The Lord Chief Justice and Lord Justice Holroyde ruled that, in line with previous judgements, when the US administration gives a promise of fair and humane treatment its word should not be doubted. The case has been remitted to Westminster Magistrates' Court with the direction that it be sent to the Home Secretary Priti Patel for the final decision on whether to extradite Assange. On 24 January 2022 Assange was granted permission to petition the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom for an appeal hearing.
Writings and opinions
Assange has written a few short pieces, including "State and terrorist conspiracies" (2006), "Conspiracy as governance" (2006), "The hidden curse of Thomas Paine" (2008), "What's new about WikiLeaks?" (2011), and the foreword to Cypherpunks (2012). Cypherpunks is primarily a transcript of World Tomorrow episode eight, a two-part interview between Assange, Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn, and Jérémie Zimmermann. In the foreword, Assange said, "the Internet, our greatest tool for emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen". He also contributed research to Suelette Dreyfus's Underground (1997), and received a co-writer credit for the Calle 13 song "Multi Viral" (2013). In 2010, Assange said he was a libertarian and that "WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical".
In 2010, Assange received a deal for his autobiography worth at least US$1.3million. In 2011, Canongate Books published Julian Assange, The Unauthorised Autobiography. Assange immediately disavowed it, stating, "I am not 'the writer' of this book. I own the copyright of the manuscript, which was written by Andrew O'Hagan." Assange accused Canongate of breaching their contract by publishing, against his wishes, a draft that Assange considered "a work in progress" and "entirely uncorrected or fact-checked by me." In 2014, O'Hagan wrote about his experience as Assange's ghostwriter. "The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses," O'Hagan recalled. "He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning." Colin Robinson, co-publisher of Assange's 2012 book Cypherpunks, criticised O'Hagan for largely ignoring the bigger issues about which Assange had been warning, and noted that O'Hagan's piece "is no part of an organised dirty tricks campaign. But by focusing as it does on Assange's character defects, it ends up serving much the same purpose."
Assange's book When Google Met WikiLeaks was published by OR Books in 2014. It recounts when Google CEO Eric Schmidt requested a meeting with Assange, while he was on bail in rural Norfolk, UK. Schmidt was accompanied by Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas; Lisa Shields, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations; and Scott Malcomson, the communications director for the International Crisis Group. Excerpts were published on the Newsweek website, while Assange participated in a Q&A event that was facilitated by the Reddit website and agreed to an interview with Vogue magazine.
In 2011, an article in Private Eye by its editor, Ian Hislop, recounted a rambling phone call he had received from Assange, who was especially angry about Private Eye′s report that Israel Shamir, an Assange associate in Russia, was a Holocaust denier. Assange suggested, Hislop wrote, "that British journalists, including the editor of The Guardian, were engaged in a Jewish-led conspiracy to smear his organization." Assange subsequently responded that Hislop had "distorted, invented or misremembered almost every significant claim and phrase." He added, "We treasure our strong Jewish support and staff, just as we treasure the support from pan-Arab democracy activists and others who share our hope for a just world."
Personal life
While in his teens, Assange married a girl named Teresa, and in 1989 they had a son named Daniel. The couple separated and disputed custody of Daniel until 1999. According to Assange's mother, during the time of the custody dispute, his brown hair turned white. In 2015, in an open letter to French President Hollande, Assange said that his youngest child was French, as was the child's mother. He also said his family had faced death threats and harassment because of his work, forcing them to change identities and reduce contact with him.
In 2015, Assange began a relationship with Stella Moris ( Stella Moris-Smith Robertson), his South African-born lawyer. They became engaged in 2017 and had two children. Moris revealed their relationship in 2020 because she feared for Assange's life. On 7 November 2021, the couple said they were preparing legal action against Deputy UK Prime Minister Dominic Raab and Jenny Louis, governor of Belmarsh prison. Assange and Moris accused Raab and Louis of denying their and their two children's human rights by blocking and delaying Moris and Assange from getting married. On 11 November, the prison service said it had granted permission for the couple to marry in Belmarsh prison. The service said the application had been "considered in the usual way by the prison governor".
Assessments
Views on Assange have been given by a number of public figures, including journalists, well-known whistleblowers, activists and world leaders. In July 2010, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that "Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government." In October 2010, Ellsberg flew to London to give Assange his support. In November 2010, an individual from the office of Dmitry Medvedev, the President of Russia, suggested that Assange should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In December 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, then President of Brazil, said "They have arrested him and I don't hear so much as a single protest for freedom of expression". Vladimir Putin, the prime minister of Russia, asked at a press conference "Why is Mr Assange in prison? Is this democracy?" In the same month, Julia Gillard, Prime Minister of Australia, described his activities as "illegal", but the Australian Federal Police said he had not broken Australian law. Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States, was asked whether he saw Assange as closer to a high-tech terrorist than to whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. Biden responded that he "would argue it is closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers". In November 2011, Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, supported Assange and in July 2012 offered his residence in Norfolk for Assange to continue WikiLeaks' operations whilst in the UK. In April 2012, interviewed on Assange's television show World Tomorrow, Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa praised WikiLeaks and told his host "Cheer up! Cheer up! Welcome to the club of the persecuted!" In August 2012, historian and journalist Tariq Ali and former ambassador and author Craig Murray spoke in support of Assange outside the Ecuadorian embassy. In April 2013, filmmaker Oliver Stone stated that "Julian Assange did much for free speech and is now being victimised by the abusers of that concept." In November 2014, Spanish Podemos party leader Pablo Iglesias also gave his support to Assange. In July 2015, British Member of Parliament Jeremy Corbyn opposed Assange's extradition to the US, and as Labour Party leader in April 2019 said the British government should oppose Assange's extradition to the US "for exposing evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan".
In July 2016, artist and activist Ai Weiwei, musicians Patti Smith, Brian Eno and PJ Harvey, scholars Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood and filmmaker Ken Loach were amongst those attending an event in support of Assange at the embassy. That same month, the documentary filmmaker and long-time supporter Michael Moore also visited Assange in the embassy. In December 2019, Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis said, "I became fascinated at this young, idealistic Australian, very tech-savvy, who developed a way for whistleblowers to upload data anonymously" and that she would be giving "100 per cent of my attention and resources" to his defence. In January 2021, Australian journalist John Pilger stated that, were Assange to be extradited, "no journalist who challenges power will be safe".
American politicians Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin each either referred to Assange as "a high-tech terrorist" or suggested that through publishing US diplomatic traffic he was engaged in terrorism. Other American and Canadian politicians and media personalities, including Tom Flanagan, Bob Beckel, Mike Huckabee and Michael Grunwald, called for his assassination or execution, though Grunwald later apologised for this, saying, "It was a dumb tweet. I'm sorry. I deserve the backlash."
Honours and awards
Works
Bibliography
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (1997)
Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. OR Books, 2012. .
When Google Met WikiLeaks. OR Books, 2014. .
The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. By WikiLeaks. Verso Books, 2015. (with an Introduction by Julian Assange).
Filmography
As himself
The War You Don't See (2010)
The Simpsons (2012) (cameo; episode "At Long Last Leave")
Citizenfour (2014)
The Yes Men Are Revolting (2014)
Terminal F/Chasing Edward Snowden (2015)
Asylum (2016)
Risk (2016)
Architects of Denial (2017)
The New Radical (2017)
See also
List of people who took refuge in a diplomatic mission
List of peace activists
Lauri Love, who in 2018 won an appeal in the High Court of England against extradition to the United States
Gary McKinnon, whose extradition to the United States was blocked in 2012 by then-Home Secretary Theresa May
Ross Ulbricht
Thomas A. Drake
Jeremy Hammond, who was summoned to appear before a Virginia federal grand jury which was investigating Julian Assange. He was held in civil contempt of court after refusing to testify.
Ola Bini, who was arrested in April 2019 in Ecuador apparently due to his association with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Notes
References
Further reading
Books
Nick Cohen, You Can't Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom (2012).
Films
Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), Australian TV drama that premiered at the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival.
Julian (2012), Australian short film about nine-year-old Julian Assange. The film won several awards and prizes.
The Fifth Estate (2013), American thriller that Assange said was a 'serious propaganda attack' on WikiLeaks and its staff.
Mediastan (2013), Swedish documentary produced by Assange to challenge The Fifth Estate.
We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013), American documentary.
Risk (2016), American documentary.
Hacking Justice (2017), German documentary.
Ithaka (2021), Australian documentary produced by Assange's brother Gabriel Shipton, which deals with his father's worldwide campaign for Julian's release from prison.
External links
1971 births
21st-century Australian male writers
Activists from Melbourne
Articles containing video clips
Australian computer programmers
Australian editors
Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom
Australian founders
Australian libertarians
Australian publishers (people)
Australian whistleblowers
Australia–United States relations
Central Queensland University alumni
Cypherpunks
Inmates of HM Prison Belmarsh
Internet activists
Living people
Media critics
Open content activists
People associated with Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections
People associated with the 2016 United States presidential election
People from Townsville
People with Asperger syndrome
Political party founders
Prisoners and detainees of England and Wales
RT (TV network) people
United Kingdom–United States relations
University of Melbourne alumni
WikiLeaks
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[
"Julian Assange was investigated by the Eastern District of Virginia grand jury for US computer-related crimes committed in 2012. His request for political asylum was granted by Ecuador and he remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London from 2012 until 2019. In 2019, a US indictment from 2018 was made public following the termination of his asylum status and his subsequent arrest by the UK Metropolitan Police in London. The US indictment accused Assange of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion by helping US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning gain access to privileged information, which Assange intended to publish on WikiLeaks. The charge was less serious than those levelled against Manning, and carries a maximum sentence of five years with a possibility of parole.\n\nAssange was arrested on 11 April 2019 by the London Metropolitan Police for failing to appear in court, and faces possible extradition to the US. His arrest caught media attention, and news of it went viral on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook. Assange himself did not consent to extradition to the US. On 23 May 2019, a US grand jury added 17 espionage charges related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning, making a total of 18 federal charges against Assange in the US. The 18 charges could result in a sentence of up to 175 years in prison. On 15 July 2019, CNN said that Assange had used the Ecuadorian embassy to \"meddle\" in the 2016 US Presidential election and had met with hackers from Russia and elsewhere to do so. CNN obtained its information from surveillance of Assange performed by security company UC Global at the Ecuadorian Embassy.\n\nIn December 2021, the High Court of Justice ruled that Assange may be extradited to the US.\n\nBackground\n\nPublication of material from Manning\nAssange and some of his friends founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and started visiting Europe, Asia, Africa and North America to look for, and publish, secret information concerning companies and governments that they felt should be made public. However, these leaks attracted little interest from law enforcement.\n\nIn 2010, Assange was contacted by Chelsea Manning, who gave him classified information containing various military operations conducted by the US government abroad. The material included the Baghdad airstrike of 2007, Granai Airstrike of 2009, the Iraq War Logs, Afghan War Diaries, and the Afghan War Logs, among others. Some of these documents were published by WikiLeaks and leaked to other major media houses including The Guardian between 2010 and 2011.\n\nCritics of the release included Julia Gillard, then Australian Prime Minister, who said the act was illegal, and the vice-president of the United States, Joe Biden, who called him a terrorist. Others, including Brazilian president Luiz da Silva and Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa, supported his actions, while Russian president Dmitry Medvedev said he deserved a Nobel prize for his actions. The Manning leaks also led WikiLeaks and Julian Assange to receive various accolades and awards, but at the same time attracted police investigations.\n\nCriminal investigation and indictment\nFollowing the 2010 and 2011 Manning leaks, authorities in the US began investigating Assange and WikiLeaks, specifically, a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, beginning in 2011. Assange broke bail to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning, and became a fugitive. The Australian government distanced itself from Assange.\n\nHe then sought and gained political asylum from Ecuador, granted by Rafael Correa, after visiting the country's embassy in London.\n\nAt the same time, an investigation by the FBI was going on regarding Assange's release of the Manning documents, and according to court documents dated May 2014, he was still under active and ongoing investigation. A warrant issued to Google by the district court cited several crimes, including espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, theft or conversion of property belonging to the United States government, violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and general conspiracy. The indictment continued to remain sealed as of January 2019, although investigations seemed to have intensified as the case neared its statute of limitations.\n\nArrest by the Metropolitan Police \nAfter Assange's asylum was revoked, the Ambassador of Ecuador to the UK invited the Metropolitan Police into the embassy on 11 April 2019. Assange was arrested and taken to a central London police station. Assange was carrying Gore Vidal's History of the National Security State during his forcible removal from the embassy and shouted \"the UK has no sovereignty\" and \"the UK must resist this attempt by the Trump administration ... \" as five police officers put him into a van. Video of Assange's forcible removal was captured by Russian video news agency Ruptly. Ruptly obtained the footage by videoing the embassy for the week leading up to Assange's arrest. Ruptly's Twitter video of the arrest achieved 1.7 million views within a day. The news of the arrest went viral on Twitter and Facebook within minutes and several media outlets reported it as breaking news. President Moreno called Assange a \"spoiled brat\" in the wake of the arrest.\n\nCNN reported that \"British police entered the Ecuadorian Embassy in London... forcibly removing the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on a US extradition warrant and bringing his seven-year stint there to a dramatic close.\" At a hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court a few hours after his arrest, the presiding judge found Assange was guilty of breaching the terms of his bail. On 1 May 2019, Assange was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison.\n\nSealed indictment\nIn 2012 and 2013, US officials indicated that Assange was not named in a sealed indictment. On 6 March 2018, a federal grand jury for the Eastern District of Virginia issued a sealed indictment against Assange.\n\nIn November 2018, US prosecutors accidentally revealed that Assange had been indicted under seal in US federal court; the revelation came as a result of an error in a different court filing, unrelated to Assange.\n\nCharge of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion \nOn 11 April 2019, the day of Assange's arrest in London, the indictment against him was unsealed. He was charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion (i.e. hacking into a government computer), a relatively minor crime that carries a maximum 5-year sentence . The charges stem from the allegation that Assange attempted and failed to crack a password hash so that Chelsea Manning could use a different username to download classified documents and avoid detection. This allegation had been known since 2011 and was a factor in Manning's trial; the indictment did not reveal any new information about Assange.\n\nCharges under the Espionage Act\nOn 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted on 17 new charges relating to the Espionage Act of 1917 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. The Espionage Act charges carry a maximum sentence of 170 years in prison. The Obama administration had debated charging Assange under the Espionage Act but decided against it out of fear that it would have a negative effect on investigative journalism and could be unconstitutional. The new charges relate to obtaining and publishing the secret documents. Most of these charges relate to obtaining the secret documents. The three charges related to publication concern documents which revealed the names of sources in dangerous places putting them \"at a grave and imminent risk\" of harm or detention. The New York Times commented that it and other news organisations obtained the same documents as WikiLeaks, also without government authorisation. It also said it is not clear how WikiLeaks' publications are legally different from other publications of classified information.\n\nMost cases brought under the Espionage Act have been against government employees who accessed sensitive information and leaked it to journalists and others. Prosecuting people for acts related to receiving and publishing information has not previously been tested in court. In 1975, the Justice Department decided after consideration not to charge journalist Seymour Hersh for reporting on US surveillance of the Soviet Union. Two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group were charged in 2005 with receiving and sharing classified information about American policy toward Iran. The charges however did not relate to the publication of the documents and the case was dropped by the Justice Department in 2009 prior to judgement.\n\nAssistant Attorney General John Demers said \"Julian Assange is no journalist\". The US allegation that Assange's publication of these secrets was illegal was deemed controversial by Australia's Seven News as well as CNN. The Cato Institute also questioned the US government's position which attempts to position Assange as not a journalist. The Associated Press said Assange's indictment presented media freedom issues, as Assange's solicitation and publication of classified information is something journalists routinely do.\n\nStephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, stated that what Assange is accused of doing is factually different from, but legally similar to what professional journalists do. Vladeck also said the Espionage Act charges could provide Assange with an argument against extradition under the US-UK treaty, as there is an exemption in the treaty for political offences. Forbes magazine stated that the US government created an outcry among journalists in its indictment of Assange as the US sought to debate whether Assange was a journalist or not. Suzanne Nossel of PEN America said it was immaterial whether Assange was a journalist or publisher and pointed instead to First Amendment concerns.\n\nFreedom of expression and information\n\nSeveral jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners consider the arrest of Assange an attack on freedom of the press and international law.\n\nFreedom of expression and information in UK and Europe\nWikiLeaks was recognised as a \"media organisation\" in 2017 by a UK tribunal, contradicting public assertions to the contrary by some US officials, and possibly supporting Assange's efforts to oppose his extradition to the United States. Dutch senator Tiny Kox asked the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, whether the arrest of Assange and his possible extradition to the US are in line with the criteria of the European Convention on Human Rights, because Assange could benefit from the protection of the right to freedom of expression and information according to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.\n\nEva Joly, magistrate and MEP, states that \"the arrest of Julian Assange is an attack on freedom of expression, international law and right to asylum\". Sevim Dagdelen, a German Bundestag MP who specialises in international law and press law, describes the whistleblower's arrest as \"an attack on independent journalism\" and says that he \"is today seriously endangered\". Dick Marty, a former attorney general of Ticino and rapporteur on the CIA's secret prisons for the Council of Europe, considers the arrest of whistleblowers \"very shocking\". Several well-known Swiss jurists have asked the Federal Council to grant asylum to the founder of WikiLeaks because he is threatened with extradition to the United States, which in the past \"silenced whistleblowers\".\n\nBritish Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that Assange had revealed \"evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan\" and his extradition to the United States \"should be opposed by the British government\". Bolivian President Evo Morales and Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, also condemned it.\n\nIndependent United Nations rights experts such as Agnes Callamard said \"the arrest of WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange by police in the United Kingdom, after the Ecuadorian Government decided to stop granting him asylum in their London embassy, exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations, if extradited to the United States\".\n\nAccording to Amnesty International's Massimo Moratti, if extradited to the United States, Assange may face the \"risk of serious human rights violations, namely detention conditions, which could violate the prohibition of torture\".\n\nFreedom of expression and information in US\nWhile US politicians encouraged the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-governmental organisations of press freedom condemn it.\n\nEcuadorian president Lenín Moreno, the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, the British Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Neera Tanden, and British Prime Minister Theresa May, who commented that \"no one is above the law,\" supported the arrest. Alternatively, it has been asserted that such a move would be a threat to freedom of speech as protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. This view is held by Edward Snowden, Rafael Correa, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Corbyn, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, and Glenn Greenwald, who said \"it's the criminalization of journalism\".\n\nEcuadorean president Lenín Moreno said in a video posted on Twitter that he \"requested Great Britain to guarantee that Mr Assange would not be extradited to a country where he could face torture or the death penalty. The British government has confirmed it in writing, in accordance with its own rules.\" On 14 April 2019 Moreno stated in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian that no other nation influenced his government's decision to revoke Assange's asylum in the embassy and that Assange did in fact use facilities in the embassy \"to interfere in processes of other states.\" Moreno also stated \"we can not allow our house, the house that opened its doors, to become a centre for spying\" and noted that Assange also had poor hygiene. Moreno further stated \"We never tried to expel Assange, as some political actors want everyone to believe. Given the constant violations of protocols and threats, political asylum became untenable.\" On 11 April 2019, Moreno described Assange as a \"bad mannered\" guest who physically assaulted embassy security guards.\n \nMark Warner, vice-chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, welcomed the arrest of Assange, saying that Assange is \"a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security\". The president of the Center for American Progress and former Obama aide Neera Tanden also welcomed the arrest and condemned Assange's leftist supporters, tweeting that \"the Assange cultists are the worst. Assange was the agent of a proto-fascist state, Russia, to undermine democracy. That is fascist behaviour. Anyone on the left should abhor what he did.\"\n\nAccording to the editorial in The Times \"the prosecution of Mr Assange could become an assault on the First Amendment and whistle-blowers\".\n\nBen Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) speculated that if authorities were to prosecute Assange \"for violating US secrecy laws [it] would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest.\" The Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest could \"set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future.\" Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is \"a major threat to global media freedom\".\nFreedom of the Press Foundation said: \"Whether or not you like Assange, the charge against him is a serious press freedom threat and should be vigorously protested by all those who care about the first amendment.\"\n\nThe French Union of Journalists (), said that \"the dissemination of documents or information of public interest\" could not be considered a legal offence. The union called on Britain \"to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and to release him.\"\n\nNSA whistleblower Edward Snowden tweeted that \"Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom.\" The Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said \"Forty-eight years ago, I was the first journalistic source to be indicted. There have been perhaps a dozen since then, nine under President Obama. But Julian Assange is the first journalist to be indicted. If he is extradited to the U.S. and convicted, he will not be the last. The First Amendment is a pillar of our democracy and this is an assault on it. If freedom of speech is violated to this extent, our republic is in danger. Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic.\"\n\nAccording to Ron Paul, Assange should receive the same kind of protections as the mainstream media when it comes to releasing information. He said \"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth ... In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.\" He added \"This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?\"\n\nThe yellow vests movement called for Assange's release.\n\nCriticism of Espionage indictment\nWidespread criticism from the news media and other public advocates ensued following Assange's arrest on Espionage charges. Multiple organisations and journalists criticised Assange's arrest as a journalist citing first amendment claims.\nThe New York Times stated: \"Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, was indicted on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in obtaining and publishing secret military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.\"\nThe Guardian said: \"By bringing new charges against the WikiLeaks founder, the Trump administration has challenged the first amendment\"\nHuffPost said: \"The charges against the WikiLeaks founder bring up huge First Amendment issues.\"\nThe Nation said: \"The Indictment of Julian Assange Is a Threat to Press Freedom.\" \nThe American Civil Liberties Union said: \"For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment.\"\nJonathan Turley described the Assange indictment under the Espionage Act of 1917 as \"the most important press freedom case in the US in 300 years\".\n\nAftermath of his arrest\n\nIndictments and possible extradition to the US\nImmediately following the arrest of Assange, the Eastern District of Virginia grand jury unsealed the indictment it had brought against him. According to the indictment, Assange was accused of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion in order to assist Chelsea Manning gaining access to privileged information which he intended to publish on WikiLeaks. This is a less serious charge than those levelled against Manning, and carries a maximum sentence of five years.\n\nAssange was arrested in April after being carried out of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he had been living since 2012, avoiding an international arrest warrant, was sentenced to 50 weeks in prison by a British judge on 1 May 2019.\n\nJudge Deborah Taylor said Assange's time in the embassy had cost British taxpayers the equivalent of nearly $21 million, and that he had sought asylum in a \"deliberate attempt to delay justice.\"\n\nAssange offered a written apology in court, claiming that his actions were a response to terrifying circumstances. He said he had been effectively imprisoned in the embassy; two doctors also provided medical evidence of the mental and physical effects of being confined. To which the judge Deborah Taylor said \"You were not living under prison conditions, and you could have left at any time to face due process with the rights and protections which the legal system in this country provides\".\n\nOn 23 May 2019, Assange was indicted, in a superseding indictment, under the Espionage Act of 1917, in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia for offences relating to the publication of diplomatic cables and other sensitive information. The indictment added 17 federal charges to the earlier federal indictment, thus bringing a total of 18 federal criminal charges against Assange from the US federal government with a sentence of up to 175 years in prison. The charges are related to his involvement with Chelsea Manning, a former US Army intelligence analyst who gave Assange classified information concerning matters surrounding the US Defense Department.\n\nOn 25 March 2020, a London court denied Assange bail after Judge Vanessa Baraitser rejected his lawyers' argument that his stay in prison would put him at high risk of contracting COVID-19 due to his previous respiratory tract infections and a heart problem. Judge Baraitser said that Assange's past conduct showed how far he was willing to go to avoid extradition to the United States.\n\nIn late June 2020, the United States Justice Department expanded the indictment against Assange.\n\nExtradition hearings\nOn 25 February 2020, Edward Fitzgerald, one of the barristers representing Assange, revealed to District Judge Vanessa Baraitser that Dana Rohrabacher as an emissary of President Donald Trump had offered Assange a pardon from President Trump if Assange could offer material identifying the source of email leaks from the Democratic National Committee during 2016.\n\nRevelations about use of Ecuadorian Embassy\nOn 15 July 2019, CNN obtained documents from a private Spanish security company, UC Global, which had been performing surveillance on Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy. CNN said the documents showed that Assange used the embassy as the command centre for WikiLeaks.\n\nReactions to the indictment\nSeveral jurists, politicians, associations, academics and campaigners viewed the arrest of Assange as an attack on freedom of the press and international law. Reporters Without Borders said Assange's arrest could \"set a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistle-blowers, and other journalistic sources that the US may wish to pursue in the future.\" Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote that Assange's prosecution for publishing leaked documents is \"a major threat to global media freedom\". United Nations rights expert Agnes Callamard said the arrest of Assange exposed him to the risk of serious human rights violations, if extradited to the United States.\n\nReactions in the UK and the EU\nDutch senator Tiny Kox (Socialist Party) asked the Council of Europe's commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatović, whether the arrest of Assange and his possible extradition to the US were in line with the criteria of the European Convention on Human Rights. In January 2020, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe voted to oppose Assange's extradition to the US.\n\nIn 2019, British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn said that Assange had revealed \"evidence of atrocities in Iraq and Afghanistan\" and his extradition to the United States \"should be opposed by the British government\". In February 2020, Corbyn again praised Assange, demanding a halt to the extradition. Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded vaguely with \"it’s obvious that the rights of journalists and whistleblowers should be upheld and this government will continue to do that.”\n\nEva Joly, magistrate and MEP for Europe Ecology–The Greens, said that \"the arrest of Julian Assange is an attack on freedom of expression, international law and right to asylum\". Sevim Dagdelen, a German Bundestag MP for The Left who specialises in international law and press law, describes Assange's arrest as \"an attack on independent journalism\" and says that he \"is today seriously endangered\". Dick Marty, a former state prosecutor of Ticino and rapporteur on the CIA's secret prisons for the Council of Europe, considers the arrest of whistleblowers \"very shocking\". Several well-known Swiss jurists have asked the Federal Council to grant asylum to the founder of WikiLeaks because he is threatened with extradition to the United States, which in the past \"silenced whistleblowers\".\n\nThe French Union of Journalists (), said that \"the dissemination of documents or information of public interest\" could not be considered a legal offence. The union called on Britain \"to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States and to release him.\"\n\nIn a letter, the two French Unions of Journalists () and () asked Emmanuel Macron to enforce Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. According them, \"Faced with threats to Julian Assange's health and at the risk of seeing him sentenced to life imprisonment, we are saying loud and clear, with the IFJ (Fédération internationale des journalistes) that 'journalism is not a crime'\". They add:\n\nThe yellow vests movement called for Assange's release.\n\nReactions in the US\nWhile some US politicians supported the arrest and indictment of Julian Assange, several non-governmental organisations of press freedom condemned it.\n\nMark Warner, vice-chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, welcomed the arrest of Assange, saying that Assange was \"a dedicated accomplice in efforts to undermine American security\". The president of the Center for American Progress and former Obama aide Neera Tanden also welcomed the arrest and condemned Assange's leftist supporters, tweeting that \"the Assange cultists are the worst. Assange was the agent of a proto-fascist state, Russia, to undermine democracy. That is fascist behaviour. Anyone on the left should abhor what he did.\"\n\nThe deputy director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Robert Mahoney, said \"With this prosecution of Julian Assange, the US government could set out broad legal arguments about journalists soliciting information or interacting with sources that could have chilling consequences for investigative reporting and the publication of information of public interest.\" According to Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor, the charge sheet contained some \"very dangerous elements that pose significant risk to national security reporting. Sections of the indictment are vastly overbroad and could have a significant chilling effect – they ought to be rejected.\" Carrie DeCell, staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said the charges \"risk having a chill on journalism\". She added, \"Many of the allegations fall absolutely within the first amendment's protections of journalistic activity. That's very troubling to us.\"\n\nBen Wizner from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) speculated that if authorities were to prosecute Assange \"for violating US secrecy laws [it] would set an especially dangerous precedent for US journalists, who routinely violate foreign secrecy laws to deliver information vital to the public's interest.\"\n\nNSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg condemned the indictment. Snowden tweeted that \"Assange's critics may cheer, but this is a dark moment for press freedom.\" Daniel Ellsberg said:\n\nAccording to Ron Paul, Assange should receive the same kind of protections as the mainstream media when it comes to releasing information. He said \"In a free society we're supposed to know the truth ... In a society where truth becomes treason, then we're in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.\" He added \"This is media, isn't it? I mean, why don't we prosecute The New York Times or anybody that releases this?\"\n\nReactions in Australia\nIn October 2019, former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce called for the federal government to take action to stop Assange being extradited from the United Kingdom to the US. Later in October, the cross-party Bring Assange Home Parliamentary Working Group was established. Its co-chairs are independent Andrew Wilkie and Liberal National MP George Christensen. Its members include Greens Richard Di Natale, Adam Bandt and Peter Whish-Wilson, Centre Alliance MPs Rebekha Sharkie and Rex Patrick and independent Zali Steggall.\n\nIn the lead up to an extradition hearing on 1 June 2020, more than 100 politicians, journalists, lawyers and human rights activists from Australia wrote to Foreign Minister Marise Payne asking her to make urgent representations to the UK government to have Assange released on bail due to his ill-health.\n\nOther reactions\nFormer Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa condemned Assange's arrest. Former Bolivian President Evo Morales also condemned it. Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, condemned the indictment. The ex-President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said that \"Humanity should demand its freedom. Instead of being imprisoned he should be treated like a hero\", during his visit in Genebra.\n\nOn Assange's birthday in July 2020, 40 organisations including the International Federation of Journalists, the National Union of Journalists, the National Lawyers Guild, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, the Centre for Investigative Journalism and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters wrote an open letter demanding that Assange be released.\n\nSee also\nChelsea Manning\nJulian Assange\nWikiLeaks\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n \n\nPolitical controversies\nJulian Assange\nWikiLeaks\n2019 in Ecuador\n2019 in London\n2019 in Sweden\n2019 in law\n2019 controversies",
"Assange v The Swedish Prosecution Authority were the set of legal proceedings in the United Kingdom concerning the requested extradition of Julian Assange to Sweden for a 'preliminary investigation' into accusations of sexual offences. The proceedings began in 2012. On 12 August 2015, Swedish prosecutors announced that they had dropped their investigation into three of the allegations against Assange, because the statute of limitations had expired. The investigation into the rape allegation was dropped by Swedish authorities on 19 May 2017. Assange said in these proceedings that he feared he would ultimately be extradited to the United States if he were sent to Sweden.\n\nIn May 2019, Swedish prosecutors reopened the investigation against Assange. The prosecutors expressed the intent to extradite Assange from the United Kingdom after he served his 50-week prison sentence for skipping bail.\n\nIn June 2019 the Uppsala District Court denied a request to detain Assange, thereby preventing his extradition to Sweden. It said the Swedish investigation did not require Assange's presence in Sweden. The prosecutor said she intended to issue a European Investigation Order to interview Assange instead.\n\nThe prosecution announced that the investigation had been dropped as of 19 November 2019.\n\nSwedish investigation\n\nComplaints and initial investigation\nOn 20 August 2010, two women, a 26-year-old living in Enköping and a 31-year-old living in Stockholm, reported to the Swedish police that Assange had engaged in unprotected sexual activity with them that violated the scope of their consent, also because one woman was asleep in one case. The police told them that they could not simply tell Assange to take an STD test, but that their statements would be passed to a prosecutor.\n\nThe next day, the case was transferred to (Chief Public Prosecutor) Eva Finné. In answer to questions the following day, Finné declared, \"I don't think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape\". However, Karin Rosander from the Swedish Prosecution Authority said Assange remained suspected of molestation. Police gave no further comment at the time, but continued the investigation.\n\nAfter learning of the investigation, Assange said, \"The charges are without basis and their issue at this moment is deeply disturbing\".\n\nThe preliminary investigation concerning suspected rape was discontinued by Finné on 25 August, but two days later Claes Borgström, the attorney representing the two women, requested a review of the prosecutor's decision to drop part of the investigation.\n\nOn 30 August, Assange was questioned by the Stockholm police regarding the alleged sexual molestation. He denied them, and said he had consensual sexual encounters with the two women.\n\nInvestigation reinstated \nOn 18 August 2010, Assange applied for a work and residence permit in Sweden. On 1 September 2010, Överåklagare (Director of Public Prosecution) Marianne Ny decided to resume the preliminary investigation concerning all of the original allegations. On 18 October 2010, his permit was denied. He left Sweden on 27 September 2010.\n\nAssange's London lawyer Mark Stephens said that Assange had asked before leaving Sweden for an interview by prosecutors, but was told he could leave the country without it. Swedish prosecutors said that on the day Assange left Sweden they had informed Assange's Swedish lawyer that an arrest warrant would be issued for Assange.\n\nArrest warrant \nOn 18 November 2010, Marianne Ny ordered the detention of Julian Assange on suspicion of rape, three cases of sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. The Stockholm District Court acceded to the order and issued a European Arrest Warrant to execute it. The warrant was appealed to the Svea Court of Appeal which upheld it, but lowered the charge to suspicion of rape of a lesser degree, unlawful coercion and two cases of sexual molestation rather than three. The warrant was also appealed to the Supreme Court of Sweden, which decided not to hear the case. Assange's legal team argued that there is no such thing as \"minor rape\", that \"rape\" is a mistranslation from Swedish, and that the allegations given do not meet the English or European legal definition of \"rape\".\n\nAt this time Assange had been living in the United Kingdom for 1–2 months. An extradition hearing took place in an English court in February 2011 to consider an application by Swedish authorities for the extradition of Assange to Sweden. The outcome of the hearing was announced on 24 February 2011, when the extradition warrant was upheld. Assange appealed to the High Court. On 2 November 2011, the court upheld the extradition decision and rejected all four grounds for the appeal as presented by Assange's legal representatives. £19,000 costs was also awarded against Assange. On 5 December 2011, Assange was refused permission by the High Court to appeal to the Supreme Court. The High Court certified that his case raised a point of law of general public importance. The Supreme Court subsequently granted permission to appeal, and heard the appeal on 1 and 2 February 2012. The court reserved its judgment and dismissed the appeal on 30 May 2012. Assange has said the investigation is \"without basis\". He remained on conditional bail in the United Kingdom. On 19 June 2012, Assange sought refuge at Ecuador's Embassy in London and was granted temporary asylum. On 16 August 2012, he was granted full asylum by the Ecuadorian government due to fears of political persecution and extradition to the United States. Assange and his supporters said he was not concerned about any proceedings in Sweden as such, but believed that the Swedish charges were designed to discredit him and were a pretext for his extradition from Sweden to the United States.\n\nReview of detention order \nOn the 24 June 2014, The Guardian reported that Assange's lawyers filed a request to Stockholm District Court to dismiss his detention, based on an update to Sweden's code of judicial procedure (1 June 2014) to conform with EU law including a new provision that those arrested or detained have the right to be made aware of \"facts forming the basis for the decision to arrest\".\n\nOn 16 July 2014, the Stockholm District Court reviewed the detention order at Assange's request. During the proceedings, Assange's defence lawyers said that the prosecutors have a \"duty\" to advance the case, and that they had shown \"passivity\" in refusing to go to London to interview Assange. After hearing evidence, the district court concluded that there was probable cause to suspect Assange of committing the alleged crimes, and that the detention order should remain in place.\n\nIn response, Assange's Swedish legal team stated to Radio Sweden: \"We still think we have very good legal arguments to get this decision overruled, so we are confident in the result of the appeal. We think the court of appeal can make another decision on the same arguments as the district court.\" Ecuador immediately issued a statement: \"The Ecuadorian Government reaffirms its offer of judicial cooperation to the Kingdom of Sweden, to reach a prompt solution to the case. In this sense Ecuador keeps its invitation to judicial officers visit the London Embassy so that Julian Assange can be interviewed or via videoconference. Both possibilities are explicitly referred in the current procedural legislation in Sweden and the European Union.\"\n\nOn 20 November 2014, the Swedish Court of Appeal refused Assange's appeal, upholding the 2010 detention order, though at the same time issuing a statement criticising the prosecution for not having done more to advance the case by proceeding with an interrogation of Assange.\n\nThree allegations dropped \nOn 12 August 2015, Swedish prosecutors announced that, as the statute of limitations for the less serious allegations had run out, and they had not succeeded in interviewing Assange, they would end part of their preliminary investigation. After 18 August 2015, Assange could no longer be charged for any of the three less serious charges. However, the preliminary investigation into the more serious allegation remained open as the statute of limitations for this charge was not expected to expire until 2020. Swedish authorities interviewed Assange on this allegation in November 2016.\n\nRevocation of arrest warrant\n\nOn 19 May 2017, the Swedish chief prosecutor applied to the Stockholm District Court to rescind the arrest warrant for Julian Assange, effectively ceasing their investigation against Julian Assange. The case may be reinstated until the expiration of the statute of limitations. Additionally, Britain's arrest warrant pertaining to bail violations remains open.\n\nIn 2013, Sweden tried to drop the Assange extradition but the English Crown Prosecution Service dissuaded them from doing so.\n\nApril 2019: political asylum withdrawn\nIn May 2019 Swedish Deputy Director of Public Prosecutions Eva-Marie Persson applied to have Assange detained as a prelude to the issue of a European arrest warrant and extradition to Sweden. The Uppsala District Court denied the request, stating that the investigation did not require Assange's presence in Sweden. Persson said she intended to issue a European Investigation Order to interview Assange instead.\n\nInvestigation dropped\nThe prosecution announced that the investigation had been dropped as of 19 November 2019.\n\nExtradition process\n\nFirst instance proceedings\n\nDetention and bail\nAssange presented himself to the Metropolitan Police on December 7, 2010, and was remanded to London's Wandsworth Prison. On 16 December, he was granted bail with bail conditions of residence at Ellingham Hall, Norfolk, and wearing of an electronic tag. Bail was set at £240,000 surety with a deposit of £200,000 ($312,700).\n\nOn release on bail, Assange said \"I hope to continue my work and continue to protest my innocence in this matter,\" and told the BBC, \"This has been a very successful smear campaign and a very wrong one.\" He claimed that the Swedish extradition proceedings were \"actually an attempt to get me into a jurisdiction which will then make it easier to extradite me to the US.\" Swedish prosecutors denied that the case had anything to do with WikiLeaks.\n\nExtradition hearing\nThe extradition hearing took place on 7–8 and 11 February 2011 before the City of Westminster Magistrates' Court sitting at Belmarsh Magistrates' Court in London. Assange's lawyers at the extradition hearing were Geoffrey Robertson QC and Mark Stephens, human rights specialists, and the prosecution was represented by a team led by Clare Montgomery QC. Arguments were presented as to whether the Swedish prosecutor had the authority to issue a European Arrest Warrant, the extradition was requested for prosecution or interrogation, the alleged crimes qualified as extradition crimes, there was an abuse of process, his human rights would be respected, and he would receive a fair trial if extradited to Sweden.\n\nExtradition decision\nThe outcome of the hearing was announced on 24 February 2011, when the extradition warrant was upheld. Senior District Judge Howard Riddle found against Assange on each of the main arguments against his extradition. The judge said \"as a matter of fact, and looking at all the circumstances in the round, this person (Mr Assange) passes the threshold of being an accused person and is wanted for prosecution.\" Judge Riddle concluded: \"I am satisfied that the specified offences are extradition offences.\"\n\nAssange commented after the decision to extradite him, saying \"It comes as no surprise but is nevertheless wrong. It comes as the result of a European arrest warrant system run amok.\"\n\nAppeal to the High Court\nOn 2 March 2011, Assange's lawyers lodged an appeal with the High Court challenging the decision to extradite him to Sweden. Assange remained on conditional bail. The appeal hearing took place on 12 and 13 July 2011 at the High Court in London. The judges' decision was reserved, and a written judgment was delivered on 2 November 2011, dismissing the appeal.\n\nAppeal to the Supreme Court\nThe High Court refused permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, but this was granted by the Supreme Court itself, after the High Court certified that a point of law of general public importance was involved in its decision.\n\nThe point of law certified was whether the wording Judicial Authority in the 2003 Extradition Act was to be interpreted as a “person who is competent to exercise judicial authority and that such competence requires impartiality and independence of both the executive and the parties” or if it “embraces a variety of bodies, some of which have the qualities of impartiality and independence …and some of which do not.”\n\nThe Supreme Court heard the appeal on 1 and 2 February 2012. The court reserved its judgment, and dismissed the appeal by a 5–2 majority on 30 May 2012.\n\nThe court granted Assange two weeks to make an application to reopen the appeal after his counsel argued the judgments of the majority relied on an interpretation of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties that was not argued during the hearing. The application was rejected on 14 June, thereby exhausting Assange's legal options in the United Kingdom.\n\nEcuador asylum and bail forfeiture \n\nFrom 19 June 2012, Assange lived in the Embassy of Ecuador in London, where he asked for and was granted political asylum due to fears of political persecution and extradition to the United States. Because Assange did not comply with his bail conditions, his supporters forfeited £93,500.\n\nAssange remained in the Ecuadorian embassy until 11 April 2019, when he was arrested by the Metropolitan Police Service (for violating his 2012 bail conditions) after the police were invited in by the Ambassador of Ecuador to the United Kingdom.\n\nAssange's lawyers invited the Swedish prosecutor four times to come and question him at the embassy, but the offer was refused. In March 2015, faced with the prospect of the Swedish statute of limitations expiring for some of the allegations, the prosecutor relented and agreed to question Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. The UK agreed to the interview in May awaiting Ecuadorean approval.\n\nAssange said he would go to Sweden if provided with a diplomatic guarantee that he would not be turned over to the United States, to which the Swedish foreign ministry stated that Sweden's legislation does not allow any judicial decision like extradition to be predetermined.\nHowever, the Swedish government is free to reject extradition requests from non-EU countries, independent of any court decision.\n\nAccusations \nAssange was arrested in his absence and wanted for questioning in relation to accusations against him of rape and sexual molestation. This was the first step in the criminal prosecution procedure in Sweden, and only after the questioning would the prosecution authority be able to formally indict him.\n\nRole of the Crown Prosecution Service\nThe leaking of correspondence between Swedish prosecutors and the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has provided an insight into the role the CPS played in the Swedish investigation.\n\nIn 2011, the CPS advised Swedish prosecutors not to interview Assange in Britain. In the same year, the CPS told Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny that year: \"It is simply amazing how much work this case is generating. It sometimes seems like an industry. Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.\"\n\nWhen the CPS was advised by Swedish prosecutors that it could drop the extradition case in August 2012, the CPS lawyer handling the case wrote: \"Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!\".\n\nAfter previously stating that she could not question a suspect by video link or in the Swedish embassy, prosecutor Marianne Ny wrote to the CPS in 2013. Her letter said that she intended to lift the detention order and withdraw the European arrest warrant as the actions were not proportionate to the costs and seriousness of the crime. In response, the CPS tried to dissuade Ny from doing so.\n\nThe CPS deleted emails communications that were sent between it and the Swedish prosecutors when a CPS lawyer retired in 2014.\n\nEmail exchanges between the CPS and its Swedish counterparts over the high-profile case were deleted after the lawyer at the UK end retired in 2014.\n\nOn 20 October 2015, a new batch of documents resulting from a Freedom of Information request to the Swedish authorities filed by the Italian news magazine l'Espresso was published online. They contain records of correspondence between the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the Crown Prosecution Service. A CPS lawyer wrote in an email to Marianne Ny that \"it would not be prudent for the Swedish authorities to try to interview the defendant in the UK... He would of course have no obligation under English law to answer any questions put to him.... any attempt to interview under strict Swedish law would invariably be fraught with problems.\" Referring to the case itself, he wrote, \"It is simply amazing how much work this is generating... Do not think that the case is being dealt with as just another extradition request.\" Assange's legal team stated that, following these revelations, they would probably challenge the extradition request in court again.\n\nAssange's supporters have accused the CPS of changing its description of the status of the case to suit its own interests. They state that the CPS declared the case as live in April 2013 in order to avoid satisfying a personal data request by Assange and said the case was closed in 2014 to justify its deletion of emails about the case.\n\nDecision to interview Assange in London \nIn March 2015, Marianne Ny indicated that she would allow Assange to be interviewed in London, and that the interview would be conducted by a deputy prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, as well as a police investigator. In December 2015, Ecuador stated that it had reached a deal with Sweden which would allow him to be interviewed in the Embassy. In September 2016, Ecuador set a date for Assange's interview over the rape allegation. The date was 17 October 2016. It was established that the interview would be conducted by an Ecuadorian prosecutor, with Isgren and a police officer present. The interview was subsequently postponed until 14 November 2016, \"to ensure the presence of Mr Assange’s attorneys,\" according to a spokesman for Assange's legal team. According to Assange's lawyer, the \"shape\" of the questions was still being discussed a week before the scheduled interview. Assange released his testimony to the public on 7 December. In his statement, Assange says that his Swedish lawyer was not actually permitted to be present during the interview, among many other complaints concerning the length and irregularities of the process and events leading up to it.\n\nUnited Nations condemnation \nOn 5 February 2016, it was announced by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights that the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had found that Assange is effectively being held in arbitrary detention by the UK and Swedish governments. High Commissioner Zeid Ra'ad al Hussein reaffirmed later the same month that the opinion is based on international law. Immediately following the opinion's publication, Assange's lawyers asked the Stockholm District Court to lift the European arrest warrant. On 14 April, the Swedish prosecution authorities responded saying the warrant should be upheld. The Svea Court of Appeal decided to uphold the warrant on 16 September. After being asked by the British to review the case, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention formally declined to do so in late November, saying that there was not enough new information provided to warrant such a review.\n\nOffers to Obama Administration \n\nAssange and his supporters have expressed concerns that upon his return to Sweden, Assange may be extradited to the United States to face charges related to his professional work, since Wikileaks has been under investigation in the US since at least 2010. On 13 January 2017, Wikileaks announced that Assange would agree to extradition to the United States if the Obama administration granted clemency to Chelsea Manning though he claimed the charges that might be pressed against him there had no merit. The offer followed one made via Assange's attorney in September 2016 that an extradition waiver would be made conditional on a pardon for Manning. Chelsea Manning's sentence was commuted on Obama's last day in office but Assange's lawyers stated that the 120 day delay in her release did not meet the conditions of their offer.\n\nStatements made by Trump Administration \n\nTwo weeks before the Swedish arrest warrant for Assange was dropped, one of his lawyers, Per Samuelson, reiterated his opposition to it saying \"With the Supreme Court's own reasoning, his detention should now be rescinded because we can now prove that the U.S. is hunting Julian Assange.\" This followed public statements made by CIA Director Mike Pompeo that Wikileaks was a \"hostile intelligence service\" and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the U.S. was stepping up its efforts against leaks of sensitive information when asked about Assange.\n\nThe United States commenced extradition proceedings in February 2020. Assange \"faces a maximum 175 years imprisonment for the 18 offences listed in the US indictment\".\n\nMelzer's investigation\nUN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer investigated the rape accusations against Assange and said he had never before seen a comparable case where a person was subjected to nine years of a preliminary investigation for rape without charges being filed. He said Assange's lawyers made over 30 offers to arrange for Assange to visit Sweden in exchange for a guarantee that he would not be extradited to the U.S and described such diplomatic assurances as routine international practice. Melzer criticised Swedish prosecutors for, among other things, allegedly changing one of the women's statements without her involvement, to make it sound like a possible rape. Melzer described the Swedish rape investigation as \"abuse of judicial processes aimed at pushing a person into a position where he is unable to defend himself\". One of the women interviewed by Melzer later sharply criticised him and demanded his resignation. She said that by defining how a \"proper rape-victim\" should act, Melzer was engaging in victim blaming and that his report was partially \"untrue and defamatory\". Melzer published a statement in which he tries to resolve misunderstandings and hopes that they will not divert attention away from the problems in the case of Assange. Later the woman said, that Assange's action has not been a crime for her and that she has \"long forgiven\" Assange.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nJudiciary of England and Wales - High Court judgement in the case\n\n2011 in case law\n2011 in the United Kingdom\n2011 in Sweden\nExtradition case law\nSweden–United Kingdom relations\nHigh Court of Justice cases\nSupreme Court of the United Kingdom cases\n2012 in case law\n2012 in British law\n2012 in Sweden\nEcuador–United Kingdom relations\nEcuador–Sweden relations\n2012 in international relations\nWikiLeaks\nJulian Assange\n\nsv:Julian Assange#Misstankar om sexualbrott"
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"Nina Simone",
"Temperament"
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What was her temperament?
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What was Nina Simone,'s temperament?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
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"Mary Klevjord Rothbart (born May 22, 1940, in Lewistown, Montana) is professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon. She is known for her research in the fields of temperament and social development, emotional development, and development of attention. She has founded Birth to Three, which is a parent support and education program. She has written over 159 articles related to educational psychology, developmental psychology, developmental cognitive neuroscience and biological psychology. Rothbart has also authored and co-authored many books, including Becoming Who We Are, for which she received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from the American Psychological Association. Two other popular volumes by Rothbart are Temperament, a Handbook of Child Psychology, and Attention in Early Development: Themes and Variations.\n\nPersonal life\nRothbart was born in Lewistown, Montana, in May 1940 to Mary Louise Klevjord. Her father, who came from Norway, was a teacher and her mother was a housewife. Rothbart was the oldest of four daughters. Though born in Montana, Rothbart's father joined the military during World War II, which resulted in most of her early years living in Utah and Washington. After attending high school in Utah, she then enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. This is where her love of learning was sparked and where she met her husband Myron Rothbart, also a social psychologist. After graduating, both Rothbarts went to Stanford, where she graduated with a doctoral degree in social psychology. While at Stanford Rothbart gave birth to her first son, then 20 months later gave birth to her second son. Her second son was born in Montreal, where Rothbart's husband was working. During her son's early years, she took three years off to stay at home with them, which led her to research development and temperament of children. She had looked into what research was available on child temperament at the time and there was not much work beyond an early study by Alexander Thomas and Stella Chess (New York Longitudinal Study). She would go on to spend countless hours interviewing and observing children and their emotional responses to outside stimuli in the process of developing the Infant Behavior Questionnaire in to define temperament in small children. Rothbart then accepted a teaching position from the University of Oregon, where she spent the rest of her teaching and research career. She is now retired from her teaching career, but continues to conduct research.\n\nEducation\nRothbart earned her B.A in Psychology (1962) from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. She went on to earn her Ph.D in Psychology (1966) from Stanford University. Rothbart worked closely with developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby who served as her major advisor and mentor while she attended Stanford University. She has dedicated most of her work to the study of child development and temperament.\n\nProfessional career\n\nAfter receiving her Ph.D., Rothbart became a faculty member at the University of Oregon, where she conducted research on the development of emotions and attention in early childhood and infancy. She is best known for her research with individual differences in infant temperament. Although her primary focus was on researching with infants, Rothbart also conducted research on temperament in early childhood all the way to adolescence. Rothbart has also conducted research on attention, the development of emotions, and social development.\n\nRothbart retired as a Professor Emerita of Psychology from the University of Oregon. Although retired, Rothbart continues to assist her peers including Dr. Michael Posner in her field of expertise. Rothbart continues to focus on educational and developmental psychology.\n\nContributions\nRothbart is a leading expert in infant temperament development and has authored many articles and books on this subject. She drew generalizations about the development of temperament in small children by identifying emotional reactions. Rothbart developed parent- and self-report questionnaires for assessing temperament in infancy, childhood, early adolescence, and adulthood. She has also developed standardized laboratory assessments of temperament, and has conducted extensive laboratory work on the early development of the emotions, impulsivity, activity, and attention. In her work, she drew distinctions between \"effortless control\" used to inhibit a dominant response in order to perform a subdominant response and \"effortful control\" consisting of abilities required to voluntarily manage attention regulation. This work examined the development of control behaviors needed to adapt to situations and suppress impulsivity, especially when the child did not particularly want to do so.\n\nHer methods of assessing infant temperament would evolve into the infant Behavior Questionnaire, developed in 1981 and still widely used today. This technique, called the Infant Behavior Questionnaire, is commonly used among researchers studying infant behavior and temperament today.\n\nUsing this questionnaire in combination with home and laboratory observations has helped infant researchers obtain more accurate data on their participants. Rothbart also uses self-report surveys for her participants, but only when she is assessing participants who are old enough to give accurate self-report data.\n\nRothbart conducted important research with Doug Derryberry to observe the emotional reactions and the different temperaments of children between the ages of three to eight. Another important collaboration involved psychologist Michael Posner, and resulted in a number of seminal papers on development of self-regulation, as well as publication of the book Educating the Human Brain.\n\nCognitive development\n\nRothbart has also done significant research on cognitive development. In 2007 she researched the differences in the human brain and how it changes over the years. She also did research on differences in education style and how this influences development. She also worked within the realm of social psychology in 2011 doing research on the brain states involved in hypnosis. She has used her knowledge on temperament in the varying ages of individuals and has begun applying it to other areas of psychology. In 2015 Rothbart did research involving the use of temperament in how mental disorders are viewed and categorized. Her most recent work done in 2016 was the role of temperament in personality.\n\nBirth to Three\nRothbart is also the founder of Birth to Three, a program that aims to serve children who have disabilities in cognitive, physical, communication, emotional, and social development. This program has helped reach parents and children across the United States to offer support and education for infant development. Because of her tremendous contributions to the Birth to Three program, Rothbart was awarded the Birth to Three's Champion of Children award.\n\nAwards\nDr. Rothbart has received several awards for her contributions in social and developmental psychology. In 2009, she received the Gold Medal Award for Life Achievement in the Science of Psychology from the American Psychological Foundation. She is also the recipient of the Block Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Child Development from the Society for Research in Child Development, and the G. Stanley Hall Award for Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association.\n\nDr. Rothbart was also awarded the Elenor Maccoby Book Award from Division 7 (Developmental Psychology) of the American Psychological Association for her book Becoming Who We Are. This book discusses the role of temperament in developing personality traits as well as biological and social influences on temperament. Becoming Who We Are combines theories on temperament with research that Rothbart and other leading temperament researchers have conducted in order to give more detail about temperament and its implications in later life. She also discusses intervention plans in order to help children who have a difficult temperament.\n\nOther major awards\nBirth to Three's Champion of Children Award (Birth to Three)\nBlock Award (SPSP) award for research accomplishment in personality research.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n SRCD Oral History Interview - Mary K. Rothbart\n Mary K. Rothbart - CAS Department of Psychology\n Mary Rothbart's Temperament Questionnaires\n Mary K. Rothbart - Guildford Press\n\nAmerican psychologists\nAmerican women psychologists\nDevelopmental psychologists\n1940 births\nLiving people\nPeople from Lewistown, Montana\nUniversity of Oregon faculty\nReed College alumni\nStanford University alumni\nAmerican women academics",
"The phrase temperament ordinaire (French tempérament ordinaire, meaning literally \"ordinary temperament\" or \"usual temperament\") is a term for musical intonation, particularly the tempered tuning of keyboard instruments. In modern usage, it usually refers to temperaments falling within the range (as understood broadly) of tunings\nnow known as \"well-tempered\".\n\nThe expression occurs primarily in French-language works of the 17th and 18th centuries concerning theory and practice of musical intonation with regard to keyboard instruments. It is discussed again, in the same or a similar musical application, in modern literature concerned with historical practices relating to keyboard instruments and performance.\n\n17th-century usage and application \n\nOne of the early historical documents in which the phrase was used is Christiaan Huygens' \"Lettre touchant le cycle harmonique\", (\"Letter concerning the harmonic cycle\") of 1691. This refers several times, in a comparative way, to \"temperament ordinaire\". The main purpose of Huygens' letter was to describe and discuss an unconventional 31-fold division of the octave. He did this by first recapitulating a conventional known temperament of his time, and then he compared that with his new scheme (which actually had been approximately conceived before, albeit without Huygens' mathematical precision); and he discussed the differences. Huygens' description of the conventional arrangement was quite precise, and it is clearly identifiable with what is now classified as (quarter-comma) meantone temperament.\n\n(A little calculation is needed to see the matching correspondence between, on the one hand, the figures in the right hand column of Huygens' table of 1691, which is headed 'Division of the octave following the temperament ordinaire', and on the other hand, the interval-values in the quarter-comma mean-tone scale. Huygens' figures are in base-10 logarithms, but in the inverse sense, and offset by 5: they range from 5 at the lower C, to (5-log10(2)) at the C an octave above. If H is Huygens' number for any note, then in modern terms, the number of cents in the interval that it makes with the lower C is ( 1200 / log10(2) ) * (5-H), and its frequency-ratio with the lower C is antilog10( 5-H ). Thus Huygens' value for G natural, 4.8252574989, corresponds to ~696.578... cents, and to a ratio of 1.495348...; and so on.)\n\nHuygens referred to this conventional arrangement, variously, in the course of his comparisons, as \"the Temperament that I have just explained\", \"the Temperament\", \"the ordinary Temperament\" (temperament ordinaire), \"the Ordinary Temperament\" (with both words capitalized), and then by mentioning \"the new Temperament\" as contrasted with \"the one that everyone uses\".\n\nAccordingly, it does appear that for Huygens in 1691, \"temperament ordinaire\" was a phrase denoting just the temperament in ordinary use, with no sign that he was using this expression as a proper or conventional name or label; and it also appears that for him, the one in ordinary use was (quarter-comma) meantone temperament.\n\n18th century \n\nThe term was later used in the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert, published in Paris in 1751–1772, which contains an article on temperament written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The article discusses the contrasting merits of equal temperament and of an arrangement referred to as \"temperament ordinaire\", \"temperament\" (without qualifier), and also as \"the common rule of temperament\", and gives practical instructions how to tune a keyboard to this temperament.\n\nIn regard to the use of the expressions denoting the temperament in this article, it is noticeable that while all occurrences of the word 'temperament' in the original article stand italicized, the accompanying words, including 'ordinaire', never are. That seems to show that Rousseau was using the phrase just to denote descriptively what he regarded as usual, rather than as a proper name or conventional designatory label.\n\nAs for the nature and identity of the temperament that Rousseau called the common one, the content of the article (see instructions reproduced below) leaves it clear that it was a circulating temperament, rather than the quarter-comma meantone referred to by Huygens about 60 years previously.\n\nIt is relevant to reproduce here the actual instructions from the Encyclopedie (in translation) for tuning to \"the common rule of temperament\", so as to leave it clear where they are specific, and where they are vague:\n\n\"To do this: 1st, start with the middle C of the keyboard, and narrow the first four fifths going up, until the fourth, E, makes a very true major third with the first note C; this is called 'the proof'. 2nd, Continuing to tune by fifths, as soon as one has arrived at the sharp notes, one then widens the fifths – even though the thirds suffer by it – and one stops when one has arrived at G#. 3rd, Return to C and tune the fifths going down, that is, F, B flat, and so on, widening them all the time, until one has arrived at D flat, which – when taken as C# - ought to be in harmony as a fifth with the G# where one stopped before. The final fifths will be a little too wide, like the thirds. But the harshness will be tolerable if the tuning across the octaves is done properly, and besides, these fifths are so situated that they are rarely used.\"\n\nAmong the notable points of this description:\n\n1: there is a possible misprint or similar thoughtless mistake, or else an instruction to cover some of the ground twice, in that the third-stage stopping point, D flat, would have been tuned already as C# before the G#, and so the expected stopping point of the third stage might more naturally be E flat/D#, to be checked against the G#. So D flat (re bemol) might have been a misprint etc. for E flat (mi bemol).\n\n2: There might have been no need for the user to actually widen any of the fifths, if only the ones between CGDAE had been narrowed: things should have worked out if all the others had just been left pure. This highlights also that the instructions are not quite specific on what to do about the fifths E->B and B->F#: to narrow them like the earlier ones? (which would necessitate some widening further along the chain), or to leave them pure? (in which case all the rest could be pure too). And then, how to distribute the amounts of any widening of the remaining fifths?\n\n3: According to the degree of any widening used, some of the thirds would actually be made worse than necessary. This point seems possibly to have escaped the originators and users of the method described here, as of other methods involving widening fifths.\n\nPerhaps it is possible to be too precise about this kind of thing.\n\nMaybe the intent of an 18th-century description, such as the one referenced and discussed above, was that complete precision was not sought at all, rather to give a guideline for completion in practice, according to the taste and ear of the individual musician.\n\nThe two scales, both referred to as temperament ordinaire by Huygens and by Rousseau/Encyclopedie, have in common the degree of tempering applied to the fifths CGDAE. The difference between them is that the 'wolf' error arising in the chain of fifths is either left whole in only one of those remaining fifths (meantone), or else divided up and distributed amongst them.\n\nThe two examples of usage given above do not seem to show any sign that the expression \"temperament ordinaire\" (in its 17th-18th-century French usages) was anything more than a descriptive or denotative phrase, denoting whatever was to be referred to as \"the usual temperament\": and the examples also make clear that other similar indicative words might equally be used instead, e.g. \"the common rule\", or \"the one that everyone uses\". Some of the modern literature might seem to apply \"temperament ordinaire\" as if it is (or might have been, in the 17th or 18th centuries) a kind of proper name or conventional label of some particular tuning arrangement(s). Perhaps it is an open question whether this was ever so. The status that the phrase actually had at that time is relevant in turn to the substantive question of what actual tuning (or range of tunings) the phrase was then used to refer to. The examples above show, at least, that the temperament so referred to was not uniquely identified.\n\nIn summary, it seems that once the 18th century had got well under way, the expression 'temperament ordinaire' could refer in the French literature to a circulating irregular keyboard temperament with some slightly widened fifths as well as some narrowed ones: and that in the late 17th century it could refer to what is now called quarter-comma mean-tone temperament. It seems not impossible that both usages might have been at some time concurrent.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Text (French) of reference Huygens (1691)\n Text (French) of section T from the Encyclopédie, including reference (Rousseau, 1751)\n Discussion and links to sources of French Baroque irregular keyboard temperaments\nRosetta Revisited: Bach's Very Ordinary Temperament Dominic Eckersley.\n\nMusical temperaments"
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"Nina Simone",
"Temperament",
"What was her temperament?",
"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts."
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DId she have children?
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DId Nina Simone have children?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
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[
"Jane Webb, also known as Jane Williams was an indentured servant in Northampton County of the Colony of Virginia. She entered a seven-year contract with Thomas Savage so that she could marry an enslave man named Left. It allowed for children born during those seven years to be bound over to Savage, but after she was free, Webb expected her children to be free. Savage used the courts to his advantage and also used stall tactics to prevent the case from being settled. In the end, Left and their children were enslaved to Savage and his heirs.\n\nEarly life\nJane Webb, born free, was a mixed-race daughter of a white woman. She worked as an indentured servant.\n\nMarriage and children\nWebb wanted to marry a black enslaved man named Left in 1703 or 1704. To do so, she entered into a signed contract with Left's enslaver, Thomas Savage, who was a slaveholder and planter. In order to marry Left, she agreed to work for Savage for seven years. During that time, if she had any children, they would serve Savage. The period of the children's servitude was not clear. At the end of the seven years, her contract would be complete, Left would be freed, and Savage would not have a claim to children born after the seven year period. While indentured to Savage, she and Left had three children, Diana or Dinah, Daniel, and Francis Webb. Under Partus sequitur ventrem, the children took their status from their mother, so they should be free. Although it was quite unusual for an enslaved person to marry, their marriage was legally valid.\n\nBackground\nFree blacks made up 10% of the population of Northampton County, Virginia. To ensure their rights, it was common for blacks to file cases in court. Unusual for the time, Webb was the head of the family household, since Left was enslaved.\n\nLegal battle\nIn 1711, Webb expected to leave Savage with Left and their children. They disagreed about the arrangement for the children and Savage would not allow Left or the children to be freed. He submitted a letter to the county court of Northampton to have the children bound to him and his heirs. The court agreed with him.\n\nWebb went to court in 1722 to have her children freed. She contented that since she was married when she had the children, they should not be enslaved. Savage did not show up in court. He said he was sick and the case was continued a term. That happened several more times. Then the case was dismissed, claiming that Webb filed a frivolous case.\n\nSavage then wanted two more children—Lisha and Abimelech—born after Webb completed of her contract. Savage contended that since she was unable to financially support the children, Savage was best suited to take care of them and to prevent them from being \"induced to take ill courses\", but their arrangement did not allow for the two children to be bound over to Savage. He could not produce the contract, but he brought witnesses who stated that the agreement with Webb was to be able to have all children born to Webb.\n\nWebb tried to free her children and Left at the chancery court in March 1725. She argued that since Webb would not produce the contract, she did not have a way to prove their arrangement. She asked that he be brought into court. On July 12, 1726, the court ruled that Lisha and Abimilech were both to Savage and Webb was arrested for allegedly stating that \"if all Virginia Negroes had as a good as heart as she had they would all be free.\" She was ordered to receive 10 lashes of the whip. In November 1726, the court told Webb that she needed to provide proof to get her children and husband; Savage claimed he never agreed to free Left. She brought African American witnesses to court in December 1726, but they were not considered admissible and were not heard. After a couple more attempts in 1727, she realized she would not win. Left, her children, and now her children remained bound to Savage and his heirs.\n\nReferences\n\nYear of birth unknown\nYear of death unknown\nPeople from Northampton County, Virginia",
"Usiququmadevu or Isiququmadevu is a creature from Zulu mythology. She is a bearded, bloated monster who eats every living thing she comes across. \n\nUsiququmadevu is said to have a husband of the same name.\n\nLegend\nAccording to legend, one day she came upon the children of a chief. As they were unguarded, she quickly swallowed them. The chief discovered what had happened and instantly set out to find her. Soon he did and killed her by stabbing her in the hump; his children emerged unscathed from her mouth.\n\nReferences\n\nZulu legendary creatures"
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"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.",
"DId she have children?",
"Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years"
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What did Nina do that was dangerous?
| 3 |
What did Nina Simone do that was dangerous?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive,
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
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"\"Do What You Gotta Do\" is a song that was written by Jimmy Webb. It was first recorded by Johnny Rivers and released on his 1967 album Rewind. In 1968, it was an R&B hit for Al Wilson. It was also a hit for Nina Simone that year and a local hit for New Zealand band Larry's Rebels.\n\nAl Wilson version\n\n\"Do What You Gotta Do\"\n\nAl Wilson's version was released as a single in December 1967. It was produced by Marc Gordon and arranged by Marty Paich. \nFor the week ending Jan 6, 1968, the single was bubbling under the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 127. By February 10, 1968, it was bubbling under at 103. The following week it had only moved up one place to 102, but at the same time, it was at No. 46 in the R&B chart. It peaked at No. 39 on March 9, 1968, and spent a total of 6 weeks on the R&B chart.\n\n\"Now I Know What Love Is\"\nThe B-side to \"Do What You Gotta Do\" was the composition by Willie Hutch, \"Now I Know What Love Is\". It was produced by Marc Gordon. It was one of a number of songs that Hutch wrote for Wilson, which included \"Who Could Be Lovin' You\" and \"Getting Ready for Tomorrow\". Hutch was also a Soul City label-mate of Wilson. It would eventually become a Northern soul hit and enduring favorite on the scene, possibly influencing some record sellers to list the record in auctions with \"Now I Know What Love Is\" as the A-side instead of its proper allocation as the B-side. It would appear on compilations such as Northern Soul from the City, released in 2004, and the Kev Roberts compiled Mastercuts Northern Soul, released in 2005.\n\nNina Simone version\n\nNina Simone's version was released in August 1968. The credited producer was Stroud Productions and Enterprises, Inc., and it was arranged and conducted by Horace Ott. It spent 5 weeks in the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at No. 83 on October 26, 1968.\n\nLarry's Rebels version\n\nLarry's Rebels released a version on the New Zealand Impact label in September 1968 backed with \"Looking for a Way\" which was composed by John Williams and Larry Morris.\n\nThe song was recorded during the group's Blast Off '68 tour. Their guitar and organ player Terry Rouse couldn't make the session so Brian Henderson played organ on the recording.\n\nBy October 4, 1968, the single had moved from No. 11 to No. 10 on the NZ listener charts. It eventually peaked at No. 6. Billboard also recorded its entry into the NZ top 10 at No. 10 for October 19, 1968.\n\nOther versions\nIt has also been recorded by Bobby Vee, Clarence Carter, Paul Anka, and Ronnie Milsap. All were released in 1968. The Four Tops released a version in 1969 which was available as a single in the UK and was also included on their album Four Tops Now!. B.J. Thomas and Roberta Flack had versions released in 1970 and the following year a version by Tom Jones was released. A version appeared on the Cher and Gregg Allman duet album Two the Hard Way. Linda Ronstadt had a version in 1993.Okkervil River released a version in 2007 on their free downloadable album Golden Opportunities Mixtape. Kanye West sampled Nina Simone's recording on his 2016 album The Life of Pablo, in the controversial track \"Famous,\" with the lyrics being sung/interpolated by Rihanna.\n\nWebb recorded and released his own version of the song on Just Across the River (2010).\n\nReferences\n\nSongs written by Jimmy Webb\nAl Wilson (singer) songs\nNina Simone songs\nRonnie Milsap songs\n1968 singles\n1967 songs",
"Nina Cortlandt is a fictional character and one half of the Cliff and Nina supercouple on the long running ABC soap opera, All My Children. She has been most notably played by Taylor Miller who exited the role in 1996. Miller returned for a special cameo in 2010, following the death of her father Palmer Cortlandt.\n\nStorylines\nNina Cortlandt was her father's daughter; not that she had much of a choice after her mother died in childbirth. For as long as she could remember, she suffered from many ailments, most notably diabetes. The pressure of her recent move to Pine Valley made her ignore her health. At a party thrown in honor of the Cortlandts at the Tyler Estate, Nina fainted as a result of appendicitis.\n\nWhen Nina awoke, she saw the face of a handsome doctor, Cliff Warner. It was love at first sight. They began dating, but Palmer did not approve of Cliff.\n\nPalmer threw Nina a lavish 18th birthday party at Cortlandt Manor. The elite of Pine Valley were invited. Unknown to Nina, Myra Murdock, the Cortlandt's housekeeper, was really Nina's grandmother. Myra phoned Nina's Mom, who was not dead after all. Daisy had fled Palmer's wrath when he found out she was having an affair. Daisy was so incredibly sad to not be able to raise her daughter, but kept tabs on Nina by staying in touch with her mother, Myra. When Myra called to tell her Palmer was trying to interfere with Cliff and Nina, Daisy came into town to defend her daughter and Cliff's love. Myra had a seance where Nina was able to communicate with her \"dead mother\" who encouraged Nina to follow her heart. Daisy dressed up in a beautiful dress and mask for the costume ball and was able to be in the same room as her daughter for the first time in years. Palmer sensed her being there and sought her out in the stables on the property and tried to force her out of hiding with his growling dobermans.\n\nNina and Cliff's love grew and grew. As they fell in love, Palmer jealously started to plot against them. When he found out his daughter had Nina had diabetic retinopathy he told her that she would go blind. Palmer told Nina she should not burden Cliff with a blind wife, so she broke off their engagement. Cliff, heart-broken by Nina breaking off their engagement, got drunk and was seduced by Sybil Thorne, a nurse who was jealous of Cliff and Nina's love. \nNina began to spend time with Palmer's employee, Sean Cudahy. Sean and Nina were stuck in a bank robbery together. She passed out in a diabetic coma. Sean and Brooke English's efforts helped to stop the robbery and keep Nina alive. Nina also became friends with the new stable hand, Monique Jonvil.\n\nNina learned that her eye condition was reversible with a non-invasive surgical technique. She traveled to Baltimore with her father to have the laser surgery done. When she returned to Pine Valley, she accepted Cliff's proposal. They married on the Cortland Manor grounds with horses and carriages. New friends Brooke and Monique were amongst her bridal party.\n\nBut married bliss was not to be. Nurse Sybil Thorne revealed that when Cliff and Nina had broken up, she had gotten pregnant with his son. Nina moved back to Cortlandt Manor and filed for divorce from Cliff.\n\nNina refused to see the man who had broken her heart. Nina still loved Cliff, but she knew they had no chance at happiness as long as Sybil held their unborn child as a bargaining chip. Monique convinced Nina to give Cliff another chance. Nina found herself falling back into his arms. They planned to announce their reconciliation at a dinner party in Cortlandt Manor.\n\nSybil arrived to break up the party. After a heated argument with Nina, she went into labor. Cliff helped Sybil as she gave birth to Bobby Warner, their son.\n\nNina watched from the sidelines as Sybil fumbled with life as single mother. She went to Sybil intent on offering to adopt her child and provide him the life she could not. Sybil threatened Nina, telling her if she did not leave Cliff she would give the child away to a stranger. When Cliff got word, he was enraged and stormed out to Sybil's apartment. That night, Sybil was found dead.\n\nNina watched as Cliff fought for his innocence in court. But, things were looking very bleak. Then, a surprise witness entered the court: Monique. Monique implicated Sean in Sybil's murder. But, when the attorney asked her who she was, Monique made a startling revelation: she was Daisy Cortlandt, Nina's mother. Nina stood up in court and fainted in the center aisle upon hearing her mother was alive.\n\nIn prison, Sean implicated Palmer as the mastermind of the entire plot. He was paying off both he and Sybil to keep Nina and Cliff apart. Nina rejected her father, and hoped to finally build a relationship with the mother he had exiled from her life. But, when Palmer went missing in Center City, Nina realized she could not cut her father out of her life forever.\n\nPalmer was found alive as an amnesiac. Nina hoped for his recovery. At the end of the year, Nina reconciled with Cliff, called off the divorce and they formally adopted Bobby.\n\nWhile her father was away on his honeymoon with the much younger Donna Beck, Nina got a frantic call from the Cortlandt Electronics Board of Directors. She used part of her trust fund to solve their fiscal problem. When Palmer returned he recognized his daughter's acumen for business and gave her an executive position in his company. Cliff did not want Nina working the long hours necessary for the job. He felt like she was beginning to neglect Bobby.\n\nNina's coworker Steve Jacobi did not seem to understand that Nina was a married woman. At her Anniversary party, he planted a kiss on her. As much as Nina wanted to keep her relationship with Steve strictly business, things spiraled out of control. She began to fantasize about Steve while making love to Cliff.\n\nA storm hit Pine Valley while Steve and Nina were working at Cortlandt Manor. They were alone in the dark by the roaring fireplace. Nina succumbed to her innermost desires, sleeping with Steve. As much as she would want to forget her night of infidelity, she could not. They began an affair.\n\nNina continued her torrid affair with Steve. Cliff went by his apartment one day to speak to Nina only to hear the lovers in a passionate embrace. Cliff filed for a quickie divorce. This time the divorce was finalized. Nina continued her life with Steve, but it was obvious his interest was waning. Nina wanted to talk marriage, while Steve was content with his life now. All the while, Nina and Cliff found themselves in many arguments over Bobby's welfare. This changed when Cliff believed that Nina had been killed in a helicopter crash. Cliff was ecstatic to learn Nina was alive. But, Cliff was now in a relationship with Devon Shepherd. Nina also knew she did not love Steve. She moved back in with her father at Cortlandt Manor. Devon stepped aside and left town.\n\nEventually, Nna and Cliff reconciled and were married for the second time by a justice of the peace.\n\nNina was mesmerized by the healing powers of a conman named Zach Grayson. Daisy tried to break Nina out of her trance. But, Nina's mental state weakened. \nZach drugged and raped Nina, while Cliff's sister, Linda Warner, took photos. Zach planned to blackmail Nina with threats of showing Cliff the photos. Nina turned to her mother for help. Nina was shocked when Daisy was discovered in Zach's apartment, standing over his dead body with a bloody knife.\n\nIn the duration of the trial, all of Zach's misdeeds came to light. The strain of the trial on her mother, and the end of any future with Cliff weighed heavily on Nina's psyche. Donna had served as a key witness for the duration of the trial. Nina began to displace all her aggression toward her father's former wife. Even after Donna exonerated Daisy for Zach's murder, Nina could not waive her intense feelings of hate towards her. At Donna's wedding to Benny Sago, Nina came with a gun. She tried to shoot Donna, but luckily missed.\n\nNina finally broke from reality. She regressed to a state of adolescence, forgetting about her life as a mother and as Cliff's wife. It tore Palmer apart having to put his daughter in an asylum, but at least it kept her away from Cliff. Their second marriage ended in divorce.\n\nNina tried to piece together her shattered life. She found solace in Benny's arms. But Benny was still very much married to Donna. Nina was convinced she was in love. Before things got out of hand, Daisy and Nina left on a long cruise.\nWhen Nina returned to Pine Valley, she began dating Matt Connolly. The couple ran into Cliff on Martha's Vineyard. Cliff's new fiancée, Dr. Amy Stone, was delayed in her arrival. Nina decided to keep Cliff company until Amy's train arrived. It was like no time had passed between the couple. When Nina saw Matt again, she knew their relationship was over.\n\nWaiting for her train to take her back to Pine Valley, Nina was plagued with thoughts of Cliff. But, she was not about to break up an engagement. At that very moment, she heard her name being called. Cliff was running on the platform, professing his love. Matt had told him that Nina still loved him. Nina got off the train as soon as she could, and the couple reunited.\n\nThat Christmas, in front of family and friends, Nina and Cliff married for the third time at the Tavern on the Green in New York City.\n\nNina anxiously awaited Cliff's return from a humanitarian mission in Hong Kong. But her world was turned upside down when news came that Cliff had gone to South America and was killed by rebels. Nina returned to Martha's Vineyard to mourne her husband. Matt followed her, afraid that she would have another break from reality. Nina wanted to be alone, but Matt refused to leave. In her moment of weakness, Nina and Matt shared a night of passionate lovemaking. As Nina lay next to Matt, she realized she did not want to be alone. She proposed to Matt and they married the next morning.\n\nReturning to Pine Valley, Nina got word that Cliff was alive. They had an emotional reunion where Cliff promised to never leave Nina again. Nina spent the night with Cliff. But, when Cliff learned about Nina's marriage to Matt, he rejected her. He wanted nothing to do with Nina anymore. She turned to Matt, hoping he would take her back.\n\nNina found out she pregnant. She realized both Matt and Cliff could have been the child's father. Still recovering from Cliff's rejection, Nina told Matt the child was his. Matt got a new job in Chicago, and the Connolly's left Pine Valley. Because Cliff had been declared dead, Nina's marriage to him was dissolved.\n\nNina returned to Pine Valley with a medical emergency. Her youngest son, Mikey Connolly, had fallen ill with a mysterious disease. She could not trust anyone else's diagnosis but Cliff's. Cliff was able to save Mikey, but in the process he uncovered something that Nina had feared all along: Mikey was Cliff's son, not Matt's. Upon learning the truth, Matt returned to Chicago without Nina.\n\nNina and Cliff were drawn to each other again. Only, Cliff was now in a relationship with Angie Hubbard. When Nina admitted to Angie that she still loved Cliff, Angie stepped aside. Nina and Cliff married for the fourth and final time on the Cortlandt Manor grounds. The Warners then left for Denver to start their lives anew.\n\nNina returns to Pine Valley for the Martin family housewarming. She had something important to talk about with her father, but decided to hold off after catching him in a heated argument with her mother.\n\nNina sent Bobby to live with Palmer. He had grown up to be quiet the handful. Nina hoped that Palmer could instill the discipline that he was lacking.\n\nUpon learning that Bobby had impregnated Kesley Jefferson, Nina comes back to Pine Valley. Palmer was ready to kick Bobby out of Cortlandt Manor. But Nina did not want Palmer to lose his relationship with his grandson because of one bad decision. Nina reminded Bobby how much she loved him, and that she would always support any decision he made.\n\nNina returns in 2010 to mourn the death of her father, Palmer.\n\nReferences\n\nAll My Children characters\nTelevision characters introduced in 1979\nAmerican female characters in television"
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"Temperament",
"What was her temperament?",
"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.",
"DId she have children?",
"Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years",
"What did Nina do that was dangerous?",
"In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive,"
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Why did she fire the gun?
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Why did Nina Simone fire the gun at a record company executive in 1985?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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she accused of stealing royalties.
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
| true |
[
"Eighteen ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name Hunter:\n\n was a dogger captured in 1646 and sold in 1649.\n was a 10-gun fire ship, previously the French sloop Chasseur, captured in 1652. She was burnt in 1653.\n was a 6-gun Royalist vessel, captured by the Parliamentarians in 1656. She foundered in 1661.\n was a 30-gun fifth rate captured from the Dutch in 1672. She was on the Navy List until 1677.\n was a 4-gun sloop launched in 1673 and sold in 1683.\n was an 8-gun fire ship launched in 1690. She was rebuilt as a 24-gun sixth rate in 1710 and was captured by the Spanish later that year.\n was a 10-gun fire ship purchased in 1739 and renamed HMS Vulcan in 1740. She was hulked in 1743.\n was a 10-gun sloop launched in 1756. She was captured in 1775 by an American privateer, but was recaptured in 1776 by . Hunter was declared unfit for service and sold in 1780.\n was an 8-gun cutter purchased in 1763 and sold in 1771.\n was a 16-gun sloop purchased, one of three ordered from builders in Bermuda in 1796 (the others being HMS Dasher and HMS Driver). She was launched in 1796, and wrecked in 1797.\n was an 18-gun brig-sloop purchased in 1801 and broken up in 1809.\n was a 10-gun brig launched in 1805 and captured by the Americans in 1813.\n was a wood screw gunboat launched in 1856. She was placed on the sale list in 1869 and was sold in 1884.\n was a launched in 1895 and sold in 1912.\n was an H-class destroyer launched in 1936 and sunk in 1940.\n was a , launched for the US Navy as USS Block Island, loaned to the Royal Navy, at first as HMS Trailer and then from late 1942 as HMS Hunter. She was returned to the US Navy in 1945.\n was a Tank landing ship launched in 1945 as . She was renamed HMS Hunter in 1947, and transferred to the Ministry of Transport in 1956, being renamed . She was broken up in 1962.\n was an patrol and training boat launched in 1983 and sold to Lebanon in 1991.\n\nSee also\n , a Canadian Forces Naval Reserve division in Windsor, Ontario\n\nReferences\n\nRoyal Navy ship names",
"Ten ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Lightning.\n\nThe first was an 8-gun fire ship launched in 1691 and captured by the French in 1705.\nThe second was an 8-gun bomb vessel launched in 1740 and captured off Livorno during the War of the Austrian Succession in 1746.\nThe 14-gun sloop , launched in 1746, was converted to a fire ship and renamed Lightning in 1755. She was sold in 1762\nThe 14-gun sloop , purchased in 1776, was converted to a fire ship and renamed Lightning in 1779. She was sold in 1783.\nThe fifth was a launched in 1806, converted to a sloop in 1808, and sold in 1816.\nThe sixth , launched in 1823, was a paddle steamer. She served initially as a packet ship, but was later converted into an oceanographic survey vessel. She was used by Charles Wyville Thomson and William Benjamin Carpenter to survey the north Atlantic in 1868.\nThe seventh was an 18-gun sloop launched in 1829, renamed Larne in 1832, and broken up in 1866.\nThe eighth , was a torpedo boat, built by John Thornycroft. She was the first seagoing vessel to be armed with self-propelled torpedoes. She was later known as TB-1.\nThe ninth , launched in 1895, was a . She served in World War I until she struck a mine in 1915 that sank her.\nThe tenth , launched in 1940, was an L-class destroyer that served in World War II. The German motor torpedo boat S-55 torpedoed and sank her on 12 March 1943 in the Strait of Sicily.\n\nSee also\n\nReferences\n\nRoyal Navy ship names"
] |
[
"Nina Simone",
"Temperament",
"What was her temperament?",
"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.",
"DId she have children?",
"Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years",
"What did Nina do that was dangerous?",
"In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive,",
"Why did she fire the gun?",
"she accused of stealing royalties."
] |
C_9dd8bb9db8454ff2b40dd845e5d4521a_0
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Did she see a doctor for her problems?
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Did Nina Simone see a doctor for her problems?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on.
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
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"Sadie Isabelle Amy Miller (born 25 February 1985) is an English actress and author. She is known for her portrayal of Natalie Redfern in the Sarah Jane Smith audio drama series by Big Finish, her novel, Moon Blink, from Candy Jar Books's series, Lethbridge-Stewart, as well as her association with the science fiction series, Doctor Who. She is the daughter of actors Brian Miller and Elisabeth Sladen.\n\nBiography and career\nAs a child, Miller did extensive voice work. At eight years old, she made her TV debut as Penny, the on-screen daughter of Minnie Driver's character, Sally, in the BBC Screen One film Royal Celebration. She appeared alongside her mother in the retrospective documentary Doctor Who: Thirty Years in the TARDIS (1993), wearing a replica of her mother's \"Andy Pandy\" striped dungarees from the Doctor Who serial, The Hand of Fear (1976). She also played Natalie Redfern in both series of Sarah Jane Smith for Big Finish Productions in 2002 and 2006, and wrote several monologues for her mother on the audio,\"The Actor Speaks\".\n\nIn the early 2010s, Miller wrote several short stories, novellas, novels, and poems for several magazines and other publishings, such as Aurum Press, and The Oddville Press. She was met with moderately positive receptions from local newspapers: Sadie's short story, \"Scarborough in July\", as a part of the short stories collection, 'Beside the Seaside', compiled by Scott Harrison, has been described as \"a bittersweet tale of loss, love and loneliness among the vacationing crowds\", according to the Telegraph & Argus.\n\nIn April 2016, Miller published her debut novel as the first book of the second series of the Lethbridge-Stewart novels, Moon Blink, under the publishing house, Candy Jar Books. She explained her comeback from her association with Doctor Who, as an author: \"...I feel that the time is right to reconnect with Doctor Who, and the fans. My dad did so last year with an appearance in Peter Capaldi’s first episode, and so now it’s my turn.\"\n\nIn 2021 Miller took over for her mother in the role of Sarah Jane Smith for the Doctor Who Big Finish Productions audio dramas, first with Tom Baker as the fourth Doctor in Return of the Cybermen, then with Tim Treloar as the third Doctor in The Third Doctor Adventures.\n\nPersonal life\nMiller completed courses with the National Youth Theatre, the Royal Court Theatre's Young Writer's Programme, and RADA's Shakespeare Course. She earned a BA in English and Related Literature, graduated with honours, and continues to act and write.\n\nAccording to her mother's autobiography, she was due to be born on her mother's 39th birthday, 1 February 1985.\n\nShe gave birth to her first son, Theodore Brian Thomas on 25 June 2016. Her second son, Valentine Heath Reginald was born on her father's birthday, 17 April 2019.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n1985 births\nLiving people\nEnglish television actresses\nEnglish writers\nPeople from Hammersmith\nEnglish women writers\nNational Youth Theatre members",
"Nicole da Silva (born 18 September 1981) is an Australian actress, best known for her roles as Stella Dagostino in the series Rush (2008–2011), and as Franky Doyle in the show Wentworth (2013–2018, 2019). She has made appearances in series such as Carla Cametti PD (2009) and Doctor Doctor (2016–2021).\n\nEarly life and education\nNicole da Silva was born on 18 September 1981 in Sydney. Her family is from Portugal and she has family living in Portugal and Brazil. She obtained her Bachelor of Arts at University of Western Sydney (UWS) Nepean, now known as Western Sydney University.\n\nCareer\nDa Silva's first on-screen credit came in the Seven Network medical drama show All Saints, in which she played Sasha Fernandez for 11 episodes in 2005. That part helped in securing her future roles, so in 2007, da Silva played Erica 'EC' Eulestra in the Fox8 series Dangerous, a role that got her a Logie Award nomination, for story of forbidden love, set in Sydney's culturally diverse backgrounds.\n\nDa Silva gained notable recognition in the Network Ten police drama series Rush, in which she appeared in all 70 episodes in four seasons as Stella Dagostino in the story based on the real-life Victoria Police Critical Incident Response Team, something similar to the SWAT in the US, with the plot exploring both the personal and working lives of the team. In the meantime, da Silva played one of the main roles as Lisa Testro in the show Carla Cametti PD (2009) for six episodes, but the series was cancelled after just one season.\n\nDa Silva is probably best known for her role in the SoHo TV drama series Wentworth, in which she appeared for 55 episodes from 2013 to 2018 as Franky Doyle, a character played by Carol Burns in the original classic Network Ten show Prisoner, which aired from 1979 to 1986. Franky is in Wentworth correctional facility, a tough lesbian inmate battling against fellow inmate Jacs Holt for the position of top dog. Da Silva played this role in the first six seasons of the series, and in the opening three seasons her character was a central role before being released at the end of the third season, however, she did return for a limited supporting role in the fourth season, and again for the fifth season when Franky is wrongly imprisoned for murder and tries to prove her innocence. The first three episodes of the sixth season conclude her story before she left the series in 2018. This role got da Silva the ASTRA Award for the Most Outstanding Performance by an Actor (Female) in 2014, and several other nominations.\n\nIn 2015, da Silva made her big-screen debut as Nana in Sophie Mathisen's romantic comedy Drama, starring Agnès Boury, Julien Bravo and Jonathan Burteaux. In 2016, while working on Wentworth, da Silva was cast for the role of Charlie Knight in the Nine Network medical drama show Doctor Doctor, in the story of a rising heart surgeon's life and his problems that converted him from a big-city doctor into a small-town doctor. She has appeared in all four seasons and will reprise her role again in the upcoming fifth season which will premiere in April 2021.\n\nPersonal life \nIn February 2014, she was announced as the first National Champion of UN Women Australia, for which she supported women's empowerment and gender equality at events around the country.\n\nIn April 2018, da Silva announced that she was pregnant with her first child, and gave birth to a baby in July 2018.\n\nFilmography\n\nAwards\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n \n \n Rush Official Website: Cast – Nicole da Silva\n Nicole da Silva on TV.com\n Nicole da Silva Actress Biography\n\nLiving people\nAustralian television actresses\nAustralian people of Portuguese descent\nAustralian film actresses\nAustralian stage actresses\nActresses from Sydney\nWestern Sydney University alumni\n1981 births\n21st-century Australian actresses"
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C_9dd8bb9db8454ff2b40dd845e5d4521a_0
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What was the name of her biography?
| 6 |
What was the name of Nina Simone's biography?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Break Down and Let It All Out
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
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[
"Alice Lightner Hopf (1904-1988) was an American writer who wrote young adult science fiction under the name of A. M. Lightner and youth nature books under the name of Alice Hopf. Two of her non-fiction works received awards from the National Science Teachers Association: Biography of a Rhino (1972) and Misunderstood Animals (1973).\n\nBiography\nAlice Martha Lightner was born on October 14, 1904, in Detroit, Michigan to Frances (née McGraw) and Clarence Ashley Lightner. Her father was an attorney, who was a founder of the Detroit Public Library and her mother was a playwright. After graduating from Vassar College in 1927, she moved to New York and worked as a secretary, writing in her spare time. In 1935, she married Ernest Hopf, an artist originally from Germany. She and Ernest had one child, Christopher.\n\nShe was a naturalist and prolific science fiction writer during the New Wave. As other women writers did at the time, her pseudonym for her fictional works used only initials, as publishers feared boys would not read works written by women. Her juvenile fiction was published in the name of A. M. Lightner. She also published children's non-fiction books under the name of Alice L. Hopf on topics in natural history and entomology, and was a member of several New York-based scientific societies. Her non-fiction works, Biography of a Rhino and Misunderstood Animals received awards from the National Science Teachers Association in 1972 and 1973, respectively.\n\nShe died on February 3, 1988, at her home in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania. She was survived by her husband, Ernest, their son, Christopher and daughter-in-law, C.C.\n\nBibliography \nSeries:\nRock of Three Planets:\n\nRock of Three Planets (1963)\nThe Planet Poachers (1965)\nThe Space Ark (1968)\n\nNovels:\n\nDoctor to the Galaxy (1965)\nThe Galactic Troubadours (1965)\nThe Space Plague (1965)\nThe Space Olympics (1967)\nWild Traveler (1967)\nThe Day of the Drones (1969), a novel noted for its reversal of gender and race roles.\nThe Walking Zoo of Darwin Dingle (1969)\nThe Thursday Toads (1971)\nGods Or Demons? (1973)\nStar Dog (1973)\nThe Space Gypsies (1974)\nStar Circus (1977)\n\nNon-fiction:\n\nMonarch Butterflies (Cromwell, 1965)\nPigs Wild and Tame (Holiday House, 1971)\nBiography of a Rhino (Putnam, 1972)\nMisunderstood Animals (McGraw-Hill, 1973)\nWild Cousins of the Dog (Putnam, 1973)\nBiography of an Ant (Putnam, 1974)\nBiography of an Armadillo (Putnam, 1975)\nWild Cousins of the Cat (Putnam, 1975)\nBiography of an American Reindeer (Putnam, 1976)\nWild Cousins of the Horse (Putnam, 1977)\nBiography of a Giraffe (Putnam, 1978)\nAnimal and Plant Life Spans (Holiday House, 1978)\nNature's Pretenders (Putnam, 1979)\nBiography of a Snowy Owl (Putnam, 1979)\nWhose House Is It? (Dodd Mead, 1980)\nStrange Sex Lives in the Animal Kingdom (McGraw-Hill, 1981)\nBiography of a Komodo Dragon (Putnam, 1981)\nChickens and Their Wild Relatives (Dodd Mead, 1982)\nHyenas (Dodd Mead, 1983)\nBats (Dodd Mead, 1985)\n\nReferences\n\nBibliography\n\n \n\n1904 births\n1988 deaths\n20th-century American women writers\nAmerican science fiction writers\nVassar College alumni\nWriters from Detroit",
"Empress Zhang, personal name unknown, was an empress of Cao Wei during the Three Kingdoms period of China. She was the second wife of Cao Fang, the third emperor of Cao Wei.\n\nNot much is known about her, other than her grandfather Zhang Ji (張既) was a governor of Liang Province (covering roughly present-day Gansu) and that her father Zhang Ji (張緝; note different Chinese character for Ji) was a commandery administrator. She was created empress in 252; at that time, her grandfather was already deceased, while her father was promoted to senior minister. (It is unclear whether she was an imperial consort before she was created empress.)\n\nIn 254, the regent Sima Shi killed Cao Fang's confidant, the official Li Feng (a friend of Zhang Ji). He then falsely accused Li Feng, Zhang Ji and their friend Xiahou Xuan of treason, and had all of them and their clans executed. One month later, Cao Fang was forced to depose Empress Zhang. It is not known what her fate was, although it would appear likely that she was put under house arrest for the rest of her life but not executed along with the rest of her family.\n\nSee also\n Cao Wei family trees#Cao Fang\n Lists of people of the Three Kingdoms\n\nReferences\n\n Chen, Shou (3rd century). Records of the Three Kingdoms, Volume 4, Biography of Cao Fang.\n Sima, Guang (1084). Zizhi Tongjian, volumes 75, 76.\n\nCao Wei empresses"
] |
[
"Nina Simone",
"Temperament",
"What was her temperament?",
"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.",
"DId she have children?",
"Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years",
"What did Nina do that was dangerous?",
"In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive,",
"Why did she fire the gun?",
"she accused of stealing royalties.",
"Did she see a doctor for her problems?",
"Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on.",
"What was the name of her biography?",
"Break Down and Let It All Out"
] |
C_9dd8bb9db8454ff2b40dd845e5d4521a_0
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Who wrote her biography?
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Who wrote Nina Simone's biography Break Down?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
| true |
[
"Good Queen Bess: The Story of Elizabeth I of England is a 1990 children's biography by Diane Stanley and Peter Vennema. It describes the life and times during her reign from 1558 to 1603.\n\nReception\nBooklist wrote \"This biography of Queen Elizabeth I does an excellent job of describing the context of her life so that reasons for many of her actions become clear. The resulting depth is a pleasant surprise and will give the book a wide audience.\" while the School Library Journal wrote \"Although the format suggests a picture-book audience, this biography needs to be introduced to older readers who have the background to appreciate and understand this woman who dominated and named an age..\"\n\nKirkus Reviews called Good Queen Bess \"An admirably clear, attractive summary.\" Publishers Weekly wrote \"The authors .. vivify another colorful character\"\n\nAwards and nominations\n1991 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award - honor\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nLibrary holdings of Good Queen Bess\n\n1990 children's books\nAmerican children's books\nCultural depictions of Elizabeth I\nChildren's history books",
"was a Japanese novelist. She was the daughter of Kazuo Hirotsu.\n\nBiography\nAfter her father died, Hirotsu wrote , which won the Toshiko Tamura award in 1972. She also wrote , which won the Women's Literature award in 1981. She wrote fewer works than her father Kazuo and her grandfather Hirotsu Ryurō. Momoko, who never married, died childless. She was buried at Yanaka Cemetery.\n\nReferences\n\n1918 births\n1988 deaths\n20th-century Japanese novelists\nJapanese women novelists\n20th-century women writers"
] |
[
"Nina Simone",
"Temperament",
"What was her temperament?",
"Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts.",
"DId she have children?",
"Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years",
"What did Nina do that was dangerous?",
"In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive,",
"Why did she fire the gun?",
"she accused of stealing royalties.",
"Did she see a doctor for her problems?",
"Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on.",
"What was the name of her biography?",
"Break Down and Let It All Out",
"Who wrote her biography?",
"Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan"
] |
C_9dd8bb9db8454ff2b40dd845e5d4521a_0
|
Was she friends with any other singers?
| 8 |
Was Nina Simone, friends with any other singers, besides Sylvia Hampton?
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Nina Simone
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Simone was known for her temper and frequent outbursts. Simone abandoned her daughter Lisa Simone Kelly for years in Mount Vernon after relocating to Liberia. When they reunited in West Africa, Simone became abusive. "She went from being my comfort to the monster in my life. Now she was the person doing the beating, and she was beating me." The abuse became so unbearable that Kelly became suicidal and moved back to New York to stay with her father, Andrew Stroud. In 1985, she fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration. According to a biographer, Simone took medication for a condition from the mid-1960s on. All this was only known to a small group of intimates, and kept out of public view for many years, until the biography Break Down and Let It All Out written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan revealed this in 2004, after her death. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier, at gunpoint, to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused. CANNOTANSWER
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Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's,
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Eunice Kathleen Waymon (February 21, 1933 – April 21, 2003), known professionally as Nina Simone, was an American singer, songwriter, musician, arranger, and civil rights activist. Her music spanned styles including classical, jazz, blues, folk, R&B, gospel and pop.
The sixth of eight children born to a poor family in Tryon, North Carolina, Simone initially aspired to be a concert pianist. With the help of a few supporters in her hometown, she enrolled in the Juilliard School of Music in New York City. She then applied for a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where she was denied admission despite a well received audition, which she attributed to racism. In 2003, just days before her death, the Institute awarded her an honorary degree.
To make a living, Simone started playing piano at a nightclub in Atlantic City. She changed her name to "Nina Simone" to disguise herself from family members, having chosen to play "the devil's music" or so-called "cocktail piano". She was told in the nightclub that she would have to sing to her own accompaniment, which effectively launched her career as a jazz vocalist. She went on to record more than 40 albums between 1958 and 1974, making her debut with Little Girl Blue. She had a hit single in the United States in 1958 with "I Loves You, Porgy". Her musical style fused gospel and pop with classical music, in particular Johann Sebastian Bach, and accompanied expressive, jazz-like singing in her contralto voice.
Biography
1933–1954: Early life
Simone was born on February 21, 1933, in Tryon, North Carolina. The sixth of eight children in a poor family, she began playing piano at the age of three or four; the first song she learned was "God Be With You, Till We Meet Again". Demonstrating a talent with the piano, she performed at her local church. Her concert debut, a classical recital, was given when she was 12. Simone later said that during this performance, her parents, who had taken seats in the front row, were forced to move to the back of the hall to make way for white people. She said that she refused to play until her parents were moved back to the front, and that the incident contributed to her later involvement in the civil rights movement. Simone's mother, Mary Kate Waymon (née Irvin, November 20, 1901 – April 30, 2001), was a Methodist minister and a housemaid. Her father, Rev. John Devan Waymon (June 24, 1898 – October 23, 1972), was a handyman who at one time owned a dry-cleaning business, but also suffered bouts of ill health. Simone's music teacher helped establish a special fund to pay for her education. Subsequently, a local fund was set up to assist her continued education. With the help of this scholarship money, she was able to attend Allen High School for Girls in Asheville, North Carolina.
After her graduation, Simone spent the summer of 1950 at the Juilliard School as a student of Carl Friedberg, preparing for an audition at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. Her application, however, was denied. Only 3 of 72 applicants were accepted that year, but as her family had relocated to Philadelphia in the expectation of her entry to Curtis, the blow to her aspirations was particularly heavy. For the rest of her life, she suspected that her application had been denied because of racial prejudice, a charge the staff at Curtis have denied. Discouraged, she took private piano lessons with Vladimir Sokoloff, a professor at Curtis, but never could re-apply due to the fact that at the time the Curtis institute did not accept students over 21. She took a job as a photographer's assistant, but also found work as an accompanist at Arlene Smith's vocal studio and taught piano from her home in Philadelphia.
1954–1959: Early success
In order to fund her private lessons, Simone performed at the Midtown Bar & Grill on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, New Jersey, whose owner insisted that she sing as well as play the piano, which increased her income to $90 a week. In 1954, she adopted the stage name "Nina Simone". "Nina", derived from niña, was a nickname given to her by a boyfriend named Chico, and "Simone" was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret, whom she had seen in the 1952 movie Casque d'Or. Knowing her mother would not approve of playing "the Devil's music", she used her new stage name to remain undetected. Simone's mixture of jazz, blues, and classical music in her performances at the bar earned her a small but loyal fan base.
In 1958, she befriended and married Don Ross, a beatnik who worked as a fairground barker, but quickly regretted their marriage. Playing in small clubs in the same year, she recorded George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (from Porgy and Bess), which she learned from a Billie Holiday album and performed as a favor to a friend. It became her only Billboard top 20 success in the United States, and her debut album Little Girl Blue followed in February 1959 on Bethlehem Records. Because she had sold her rights outright for $3,000, Simone lost more than $1 million in royalties (notably for the 1980s re-release of her version of the jazz standard "My Baby Just Cares for Me") and never benefited financially from the album's sales.
1959–1964: Burgeoning popularity
After the success of Little Girl Blue, Simone signed a contract with Colpix Records and recorded a multitude of studio and live albums. Colpix relinquished all creative control to her, including the choice of material that would be recorded, in exchange for her signing the contract with them. After the release of her live album Nina Simone at Town Hall, Simone became a favorite performer in Greenwich Village. By this time, Simone performed pop music only to make money to continue her classical music studies, and was indifferent about having a recording contract. She kept this attitude toward the record industry for most of her career.
Simone married a New York police detective, Drew Stroud, in December 1961. In a few years he became her manager and the father of her daughter Lisa, but later he abused Simone psychologically and physically.
1964–1974: Civil Rights era
In 1964, Simone changed record distributors from Colpix, an American company, to the Dutch Philips Records, which meant a change in the content of her recordings. She had always included songs in her repertoire that drew on her African-American heritage, such as "Brown Baby" by Oscar Brown and "Zungo" by Michael Olatunji on her album Nina at the Village Gate in 1962. On her debut album for Philips, Nina Simone in Concert (1964), for the first time she addressed racial inequality in the United States in the song "Mississippi Goddam". This was her response to the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers and the September 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four young black girls and partly blinded a fifth. She said that the song was "like throwing ten bullets back at them", becoming one of many other protest songs written by Simone. The song was released as a single, and it was boycotted in some southern states. Promotional copies were smashed by a Carolina radio station and returned to Philips. She later recalled how "Mississippi Goddam" was her "first civil rights song" and that the song came to her "in a rush of fury, hatred and determination". The song challenged the belief that race relations could change gradually and called for more immediate developments: "me and my people are just about due". It was a key moment in her path to Civil Rights activism. "Old Jim Crow", on the same album, addressed the Jim Crow laws. After "Mississippi Goddam", a civil rights message was the norm in Simone's recordings and became part of her concerts. As her political activism rose, the rate of release of her music slowed.
Simone performed and spoke at civil rights meetings, such as at the Selma to Montgomery marches. Like Malcolm X, her neighbor in Mount Vernon, New York, she supported black nationalism and advocated violent revolution rather than Martin Luther King Jr.'s non-violent approach. She hoped that African Americans could use armed combat to form a separate state, though she wrote in her autobiography that she and her family regarded all races as equal.
In 1967, Simone moved from Philips to RCA Victor. She sang "Backlash Blues" written by her friend, Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes, on her first RCA album, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (1967). On Silk & Soul (1967), she recorded Billy Taylor's "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Turning Point". The album 'Nuff Said! (1968) contained live recordings from the Westbury Music Fair of April 7, 1968, three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. She dedicated the performance to him and sang "Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)", a song written by her bass player, Gene Taylor. In 1969, she performed at the Harlem Cultural Festival in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, immortalized in Questlove's 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.
Simone and Weldon Irvine turned the unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black by Lorraine Hansberry into a civil rights song of the same name. She credited her friend Hansberry with cultivating her social and political consciousness. She performed the song live on the album Black Gold (1970). A studio recording was released as a single, and renditions of the song have been recorded by Aretha Franklin (on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Donny Hathaway. When reflecting on this period, she wrote in her autobiography, "I felt more alive then than I feel now because I was needed, and I could sing something to help my people".
1974–1993: Later life
In an interview for Jet magazine, Simone stated that her controversial song "Mississippi Goddam" harmed her career. She claimed that the music industry punished her by boycotting her records. Hurt and disappointed, Simone left the US in September 1970, flying to Barbados and expecting her husband and manager (Andrew Stroud) to communicate with her when she had to perform again. However, Stroud interpreted Simone's sudden disappearance, and the fact that she had left behind her wedding ring, as an indication of her desire for a divorce. As her manager, Stroud was in charge of Simone's income.
When Simone returned to the United States, she learned that a warrant had been issued for her arrest for unpaid taxes (unpaid as a protest against her country's involvement with the Vietnam War), and returned to Barbados to evade the authorities and prosecution. Simone stayed in Barbados for quite some time, and had a lengthy affair with the Prime Minister, Errol Barrow. A close friend, singer Miriam Makeba, then persuaded her to go to Liberia. When Simone relocated, she abandoned her daughter Lisa in Mount Vernon. Lisa eventually reunited with Simone in Liberia, but, according to Lisa, her mother was physically and mentally abusive. The abuse was so unbearable that Lisa became suicidal and she moved back to New York to live with her father Andrew Stroud. Simone recorded her last album for RCA, It Is Finished, in 1974, and did not make another record until 1978, when she was persuaded to go into the recording studio by CTI Records owner Creed Taylor. The result was the album Baltimore, which, while not a commercial success, was fairly well received critically and marked a quiet artistic renaissance in Simone's recording output. Her choice of material retained its eclecticism, ranging from spiritual songs to Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl". Four years later, Simone recorded Fodder on My Wings on a French label, Studio Davout.
During the 1980s, Simone performed regularly at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, where she recorded the album Live at Ronnie Scott's in 1984. Although her early on-stage style could be somewhat haughty and aloof, in later years, Simone particularly seemed to enjoy engaging with her audiences sometimes, by recounting humorous anecdotes related to her career and music and by soliciting requests. By this time she stayed everywhere and nowhere. She lived in Liberia, Barbados and Switzerland and eventually ended up in Paris. There she regularly performed in a small jazz club called Aux Trois Mailletz for relatively small financial reward. The performances were sometimes brilliant and at other times Nina Simone gave up after fifteen minutes. Often she was too drunk to sing or play the piano properly. At other times she scolded the audience. The end of Nina Simone seemed in sight. Manager Raymond Gonzalez, guitarist Al Schackman and Gerrit de Bruin, a Dutch friend of hers, decided to intervene.
Simone moved to Nijmegen in the Netherlands in the spring of 1988. She had just scored a huge European hit with the song "My Baby Just Cares for Me". Recorded by her for the first time in 1958, the song was used in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 perfume in Europe, leading to a re-release of the recording. This stormed to number 4 on the UK's NME singles chart, giving Simone a brief surge in popularity in the UK and elsewhere.
In 1988 she bought an apartment next to the Belvoir Hotel with view of the Waalbrug and Ooijpolder, with the help of her friend Gerrit de Bruin, who lived with his family a few corners away and kept an eye on her. The idea was to bring Simone to Nijmegen to relax and get back on track. A daily caretaker, Jackie Hammond from London, was hired for her. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. Unfortunately, the tantrums followed her to Nijmegen. Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a friend of De Bruin, who prescribed Trilafon for her. Despite the miserable illness, it was generally a happy time for Simone in Nijmegen, where she could lead a fairly anonymous life. Only a few recognized her, but most Nijmegen people did not know who she was. Slowly but surely her life started to improve, and she was even able to make money from the Chanel commercial after a legal battle. In 1991 Nina Simone exchanged Nijmegen for the more lively Amsterdam, where she lived for two years with friends and Hammond.
1993–2003: Final years, illness and death
In 1993, Simone settled near Aix-en-Provence in southern France (Bouches-du-Rhône). In the same year, her final album, A Single Woman, was released. She variously contended that she married or had a love affair with a Tunisian around this time, but that their relationship ended because, "His family didn't want him to move to France, and France didn't want him because he's a North African." During a 1998 performance in Newark, she announced, "If you're going to come see me again, you've got to come to France, because I am not coming back." She suffered from breast cancer for several years before she died in her sleep at her home in Carry-le-Rouet (Bouches-du-Rhône), on April 21, 2003. Her Catholic funeral service at the local parish was attended by singers Miriam Makeba and Patti LaBelle, poet Sonia Sanchez, actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and hundreds of others. Simone's ashes were scattered in several African countries. Her daughter Lisa Celeste Stroud is an actress and singer who took the stage name Simone, and who has appeared on Broadway in Aida.
Activism
Influence
Simone's consciousness on the racial and social discourse was prompted by her friendship with black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Simone stated that during her conversations with Hansberry "we never talked about men or clothes. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution – real girls’ talk". The influence of Hansberry planted the seed for the provocative social commentary that became an expectation in Simone's repertoire. One of Nina's more hopeful activism anthems, "To Be Young, Gifted and Black", was written with collaborator Weldon Irvine in the years following the playwright's passing, acquiring the title of one of Hansberry's unpublished plays. Simone's social circles included notable black leftists such as James Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael and Langston Hughes: the lyrics of her song "Backlash Blues" were written by the latter.
Beyond the civil rights movement
Simone's social commentary was not limited to the civil rights movement; the song "Four Women" exposed the eurocentric appearance standards imposed on black women in America, as it explored the internalized dilemma of beauty that is experienced between four black women with skin tones ranging from light to dark. She explains in her autobiography I Put a Spell on You that the purpose of the song was to inspire black women to define beauty and identity for themselves without the influence of societal impositions. Chardine Taylor-Stone has noted that, beyond the politics of beauty, the song also describes the stereotypical roles that many black women have historically been restricted to: the mammy, the tragic mulatto, the sex worker and the angry black woman.
Artistry
Simone standards
Throughout her career, Simone assembled a collection of songs that became standards in her repertoire. Some were songs that she wrote herself, while others were new arrangements of other standards, and others had been written especially for the singer. Her first hit song in America was her rendition of George Gershwin's "I Loves You, Porgy" (1958). It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.
During that same period Simone recorded "My Baby Just Cares for Me", which would become her biggest success years later, in 1987, after it was featured in a 1986 Chanel No. 5 perfume commercial. A music video was also created by Aardman Studios. Well-known songs from her Philips albums include "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" on Broadway-Blues-Ballads (1964); "I Put a Spell on You", "Ne me quitte pas" (a rendition of a Jacques Brel song), and "Feeling Good" on I Put a Spell On You (1965); and "Lilac Wine" and "Wild Is the Wind" on Wild is the Wind (1966).
"Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" and her takes on "Feeling Good" and "Sinnerman" (Pastel Blues, 1965) have remained popular in cover versions (most notably a version of the former song by The Animals), sample usage, and their use on soundtracks for various movies, television series, and video games. "Sinnerman" has been featured in the films The Crimson Pirate (1952), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), High Crimes (2002), Cellular (2004), Déjà Vu (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Golden Door (2006), Inland Empire (2006), and Harriet (2019), as well as in TV series such as Homicide: Life on the Street (1998, "Sins of the Father"), Nash Bridges (2000, "Jackpot"), Scrubs (2001, "My Own Personal Jesus"), Boomtown (2003, "The Big Picture"), Person of Interest (2011, "Witness"), Shameless (2011, "Kidnap and Ransom"), Love/Hate (2011, "Episode 1"), Sherlock (2012, "The Reichenbach Fall"), The Blacklist (2013, "The Freelancer"), Vinyl (2016, "The Racket"), Lucifer (2017, "Favorite Son"), and The Umbrella Academy (2019, "Extra Ordinary"), and sampled by artists such as Talib Kweli (2003, "Get By"), Timbaland (2007, "Oh Timbaland"), and Flying Lotus (2012, "Until the Quiet Comes"). The song "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" was sampled by Devo Springsteen on "Misunderstood" from Common's 2007 album Finding Forever, and by little-known producers Rodnae and Mousa for the song "Don't Get It" on Lil Wayne's 2008 album Tha Carter III. "See-Line Woman" was sampled by Kanye West for "Bad News" on his album 808s & Heartbreak. The 1965 rendition of "Strange Fruit", originally recorded by Billie Holiday, was sampled by Kanye West for "Blood on the Leaves" on his album Yeezus.
Simone's years at RCA-Victor spawned many singles and album tracks that were popular, particularly in Europe. In 1968, it was "Ain't Got No, I Got Life", a medley from the musical Hair from the album 'Nuff Said! (1968) that became a surprise hit for Simone, reaching number 2 on the UK Singles Chart and introducing her to a younger audience. In 2006, it returned to the UK Top 30 in a remixed version by Groovefinder.
The following single, a rendition of the Bee Gees' "To Love Somebody", also reached the UK Top 10 in 1969. "The House of the Rising Sun" was featured on Nina Simone Sings the Blues in 1967, but Simone had recorded the song in 1961 and it was featured on Nina at the Village Gate (1962).
Performance style
Simone's bearing and stage presence earned her the title "the High Priestess of Soul". She was a pianist, singer and performer, "separately, and simultaneously." As a composer and arranger, Simone moved from gospel to blues, jazz, and folk, and to numbers with European classical styling. Besides using Bach-style counterpoint, she called upon the particular virtuosity of the 19th-century Romantic piano repertoire—Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and others. Jazz trumpeter Miles Davis spoke highly of Simone, deeply impressed by her ability to play three-part counterpoint (her two hands on the piano and her voice each providing a separate but complementary melody line). Onstage, she incorporated monologues and dialogues with the audience into the program, and often used silence as a musical element. Throughout most of her life and recording career she was accompanied by percussionist Leopoldo Fleming and guitarist and musical director Al Schackman. She was known to pay close attention to the design and acoustics of each venue, tailoring her performances to individual venues.
Simone was perceived as a sometimes difficult or unpredictable performer, occasionally hectoring the audience if she felt they were disrespectful. Schackman would try to calm Simone during these episodes, performing solo until she calmed offstage and returned to finish the engagement. Her early experiences as a classical pianist had conditioned Simone to expect quiet attentive audiences, and her anger tended to flare up at nightclubs, lounges, or other locations where patrons were less attentive. Schackman described her live appearances as hit or miss, either reaching heights of hypnotic brilliance or on the other hand mechanically playing a few songs and then abruptly ending concerts early.
Critical reputation
Simone is regarded as one of the most influential recording artist of 20th-century jazz, cabaret and R&B genres. According to Rickey Vincent, she was a pioneering musician whose career was characterized by "fits of outrage and improvisational genius". Pointing to her composition of "Mississippi Goddam", Vincent said Simone broke the mold, having the courage as "an established black musical entertainer to break from the norms of the industry and produce direct social commentary in her music during the early 1960s".
In naming Simone the 29th-greatest singer of all time, Rolling Stone wrote that "her honey-coated, slightly adenoidal cry was one of the most affecting voices of the civil rights movement", while making note of her ability to "belt barroom blues, croon cabaret and explore jazz — sometimes all on a single record." In the opinion of AllMusic's Mark Deming, she was "one of the most gifted vocalists of her generation, and also one of the most eclectic". Creed Taylor, who annotated the liner notes for Simone's 1978 Baltimore album, said the singer possessed a "magnificent intensity" that "turns everything—even the most simple, mundane phrase or lyric—into a radiant, poetic message". Jim Fusilli, music critic for The Wall Street Journal, writes that Simone's music is still relevant today: "it didn't adhere to ephemeral trends, it isn't a relic of a bygone era; her vocal delivery and technical skills as a pianist still dazzle; and her emotional performances have a visceral impact."
"She is loved or feared, adored or disliked", Maya Angelou wrote in 1970, "but few who have met her music or glimpsed her soul react with moderation". Robert Christgau, who disliked Simone, wrote that her "penchant for the mundane renders her intensity as bogus as her mannered melismas and pronunciation (move over, Inspector Clouseau) and the rote flatting of her vocal improvisations." Regarding her piano playing, he dismissed Simone as a "middlebrow keyboard tickler ... whose histrionic rolls insert unconvincing emotion into a song". He later attributed his generally negative appraisal to Simone's consistent seriousness of manner, depressive tendencies, and classical background.
Mental health
Simone was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the late 1980s. She was known for her temper and outbursts of aggression. In 1985, Simone fired a gun at a record company executive, whom she accused of stealing royalties. Simone said she "tried to kill him" but "missed". In 1995 while living in France, she shot and wounded her neighbor's son with an air gun after the boy's laughter disturbed her concentration and she perceived his response to her complaints as racial insults; she was sentenced to eight months in jail, which was suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation and treatment.
According to a biographer, Simone took medication from the mid-1960s onward, although this was supposedly only known to a small group of intimates. After her death the medication was confirmed as the anti-psychotic Trilafon, which Simone's friends and caretakers sometimes surreptitiously mixed into her food when she refused to follow her treatment plan. This fact was kept out of public view until 2004 when a biography, Break Down and Let It All Out, written by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan (of her UK fan club), was published posthumously. Singer-songwriter Janis Ian, a one-time friend of Simone's, related in her own autobiography, Society's Child: My Autobiography, two instances to illustrate Simone's volatility: one incident in which she forced a shoe store cashier at gunpoint to take back a pair of sandals she'd already worn; and another in which Simone demanded a royalty payment from Ian herself as an exchange for having recorded one of Ian's songs, and then ripped a pay telephone out of its wall when she was refused.
Awards and recognition
Simone was the recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 2000 for her interpretation of "I Loves You, Porgy." On Human Kindness Day 1974 in Washington, D.C., more than 10,000 people paid tribute to Simone.
Simone received two honorary degrees in music and humanities, from Amherst College and Malcolm X College. She preferred to be called "Dr. Nina Simone" after these honors were bestowed upon her. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
Two days before her death, Simone learned she would be awarded an honorary degree by the Curtis Institute of Music, the music school that had refused to admit her as a student at the beginning of her career.
Simone has received four career Grammy Award nominations, two during her lifetime and two posthumously. In 1968, she received her first nomination for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance for the track "(You'll) Go to Hell" from her thirteenth album Silk & Soul (1967). The award went to "Respect" by Aretha Franklin.
Simone garnered a second nomination in the category in 1971, for her Black Gold album, when she again lost to Franklin for "Don't Play That Song (You Lied)". Franklin would again win for her cover of Simone's "Young, Gifted and Black" two years later in the same category. In 2016, Simone posthumously received a nomination for Best Music Film for the Netflix documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? and in 2018 she received a nomination for Best Rap Song as a songwriter for Jay-Z's "The Story of O.J." from his 4:44 album which contained a sample of "Four Women" by Simone.
In 2018, Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by fellow R&B artist Mary J. Blige.
In 2019, "Mississippi Goddam" was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
Legacy and influence
Music
Musicians who have cited Simone as important for their own musical upbringing include Elton John (who named one of his pianos after her), Madonna, Aretha Franklin, Adele, David Bowie, Patti LaBelle, Boy George, Emeli Sandé, Antony and the Johnsons, Dianne Reeves, Sade, Janis Joplin, Nick Cave, Van Morrison, Christina Aguilera, Elkie Brooks, Talib Kweli, Mos Def, Kanye West, Lena Horne, Bono, John Legend, Elizabeth Fraser, Cat Stevens, Anna Calvi, Cat Power, Lykke Li, Peter Gabriel, Justin Hayward, Maynard James Keenan, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, Mary J. Blige, Fantasia Barrino, Michael Gira, Angela McCluskey, Lauryn Hill, Patrice Babatunde, Alicia Keys, Alex Turner, Lana Del Rey, Hozier, Matt Bellamy, Ian MacKaye, Kerry Brothers, Jr., Krucial, Amanda Palmer, Steve Adey and Jeff Buckley. John Lennon cited Simone's version of "I Put a Spell on You" as a source of inspiration for the Beatles' song "Michelle". American singer Meshell Ndegeocello released her own tribute album Pour une Âme Souveraine: A Dedication to Nina Simone in 2012. The following year, experimental band Xiu Xiu released a cover album, Nina. In late 2019, American rapper Wale released an album titled Wow... That's Crazy, containing a track called "Love Me Nina/Semiautomatic" which contains audio clips from Simone.
Simone's music has been featured in soundtracks of various motion pictures and video games, including La Femme Nikita (1990), Point of No Return (1993), Shallow Grave (1994), The Big Lebowski (1998), Any Given Sunday (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), Disappearing Acts (2000), Six Feet Under (2001), The Dancer Upstairs (2002), Before Sunset (2004), Cellular (2004), Inland Empire (2006), Miami Vice (2006), Sex and the City (2008), The World Unseen (2008), Revolutionary Road (2008), Home (2008), Watchmen (2009), The Saboteur (2009), Repo Men (2010), Beyond the Lights (2014), and "Nobody" (2021). Frequently her music is used in remixes, commercials, and TV series including "Feeling Good", which featured prominently in the Season Four Promo of Six Feet Under (2004). Simone's "Take Care of Business" is the closing theme of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Simone's cover of Janis Ian's "Stars" is played during the final moments of the season 3 finale of BoJack Horseman (2016), and "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free" and "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" were included in the film Acrimony (2018).
Film
The documentary Nina Simone: La légende (The Legend) was made in the 1990s by French filmmakers and based on her autobiography I Put a Spell on You. It features live footage from different periods of her career, interviews with family, various interviews with Simone then living in the Netherlands, and while on a trip to her birthplace. A portion of footage from The Legend was taken from an earlier 26-minute biographical documentary by Peter Rodis, released in 1969 and entitled simply Nina. Her filmed 1976 performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival is available on video courtesy of Eagle Rock Entertainment and is screened annually in New York City at an event called "The Rise and Fall of Nina Simone: Montreux, 1976" which is curated by Tom Blunt.
Footage of Simone singing "Mississippi Goddam" for 40,000 marchers at the end of the Selma to Montgomery marches can be seen in the 1970 documentary King: A Filmed Record... Montgomery to Memphis and the 2015 Liz Garbus documentary What Happened, Miss Simone?
Plans for a Simone biographical film were released at the end of 2005, to be based on Simone's autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992) and to focus on her relationship in later life with her assistant, Clifton Henderson, who died in 2006; Simone's daughter, Lisa Simone Kelly, has since refuted the existence of a romantic relationship between Simone and Henderson on account of his homosexuality. Cynthia Mort (screenwriter of Will & Grace and Roseanne), wrote the screenplay and directed the 2016 film Nina, starring Zoe Saldana who has since openly apologized for taking the controversial title role.
In 2015, two documentary features about Simone's life and music were released. The first, directed by Liz Garbus, What Happened, Miss Simone? was produced in cooperation with Simone's estate and her daughter, who also served as the film's executive producer. The film was produced as a counterpoint to the unauthorized Cynthia Mort film (Nina, 2016), and featured previously unreleased archival footage. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2015 and was distributed by Netflix on June 26, 2015. It was nominated on January 14, 2016, for a 2016 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
The second documentary in 2015, The Amazing Nina Simone is an independent film written and directed by Jeff L. Lieberman, who initially consulted with Simone's daughter, Lisa before going the independent route and then worked closely with Simone's siblings, predominantly Sam Waymon. The film debuted in cinemas in October 2015, and has since played more than 100 theatres in 10 countries.
Drama
She is the subject of Nina: A Story About Me and Nina Simone, a one-woman show first performed in 2016 at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool — a "deeply personal and often searing show inspired by the singer and activist Nina Simone" — and which in July 2017 ran at the Young Vic, before being scheduled to move to Edinburgh's Traverse Theatre.
Books
As well as her 1992 autobiography I Put a Spell on You (1992), written with Stephen Cleary, Simone has been the subject of several books. They include Nina Simone: Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood (2002) by Richard Williams; Nina Simone: Break Down and Let It All Out (2004) by Sylvia Hampton and David Nathan; Princess Noire (2010) by Nadine Cohodas; Nina Simone (2004) by Kerry Acker; Nina Simone, Black is the Color (2005) by Andrew Stroud; and What Happened, Miss Simone? (2016) by Alan Light.
Simone inspired a book of poetry, Me and Nina, by Monica Hand, and is the focus of musician Warren Ellis's book Nina Simone's Gum (2021).
Honors
In 2002, the city of Nijmegen, Netherlands, named a street after her, as "Nina Simone Street": she had lived in Nijmegen between 1988 and 1990. On August 29, 2005, the city of Nijmegen, the De Vereeniging concert hall, and more than 50 artists (among whom were Frank Boeijen, Rood Adeo, and Fay Claassen) honored Simone with the tribute concert Greetings from Nijmegen.
Simone was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2009.
In 2010, a statue in her honor was erected on Trade Street in her native Tryon, North Carolina.
The promotion from the French Institute of Political Studies of Lille (Sciences Po Lille), due to obtain their master's degree in 2021, named themselves in her honor. The decision was made that this promotion was henceforth to be known as 'la promotion Nina Simone' after a vote in 2017.
Simone was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2018.
The Proms paid a homage to Nina Simone in 2019, an event called Mississippi Goddamn was performed by The Metropole Orkest at Royal Albert Hall led by Jules Buckley. Ledisi, Lisa Fischer and Jazz Trio, LaSharVu provided vocals.
Discography
References
Sources
External links
The Amazing Nina Simone: A Documentary Film
1933 births
2003 deaths
20th-century American pianists
20th-century African-American women singers
Activists for African-American civil rights
Activists from North Carolina
African-American activists
African-American Christians
African-American women singer-songwriters
African and Black nationalists
American contraltos
American expatriates in France
American expatriates in Liberia
American expatriates in Switzerland
American expatriates in the Netherlands
American women jazz singers
American jazz pianists
American women pianists
American jazz singers
American rhythm and blues singer-songwriters
American soul musicians
American tax resisters
American women activists
Bethlehem Records artists
Charly Records artists
Colpix Records artists
Deaths from breast cancer
Deaths from cancer in France
Elektra Records artists
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners
Jazz musicians from North Carolina
Jazz songwriters
Juilliard School alumni
Singer-songwriters from North Carolina
Nightclub performers
People from Tryon, North Carolina
People from Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur
People with bipolar disorder
Philips Records artists
RCA Victor artists
Soul-jazz musicians
Torch singers
Verve Records artists
African-American Catholics
African-American pianists
Roman Catholic activists
American socialists
| true |
[
"Danielle Leigh Curiel (born December 20, 1994), known professionally as DaniLeigh, is an American singer, songwriter, rapper, dancer, and choreographer. Initially appearing as a backup dancer, Curiel began her career by posting covers of popular songs on YouTube before moving to Los Angeles, where she began choreographing for other artists and dancing. She made a career breakthrough after working with Prince on the music video for his single \"Breakfast Can Wait\". DaniLeigh was signed to Def Jam Records in 2017, releasing mixtapes and singles starting that year.\n\nEarly and personal life\nCuriel was born on December 20, 1994, in Miami, Florida, to Dominican parents. She was deeply interested in music during her youth, and cites Missy Elliott, Aaliyah, Drake, and Rihanna as influences. She started dancing at the age of 12 and singing at the age of 14, though she was initially too shy to sing in front of others until she received positive feedback. Though she started posting vocal covers of songs such as Musiq Soulchild's \"So Beautiful\" on YouTube, her career did not officially start until she moved to Los Angeles, where she made connections and started off as a backup dancer to artists such as Pharrell Williams and Nelly Furtado. She also formed part of the pop duo Curly Fryz with her sister. DaniLeigh has a daughter with rapper DaBaby.\n\nCareer\nCuriel was asked by Prince to direct the video for his single \"Breakfast Can Wait\" when she was 18 years old. Following the video's success, Prince continued mentoring DaniLeigh until his death in 2016. She released her first single \"D.O.S.E\" in 2015, but her first successful single was \"Play\", released in 2017. The single is an empowerment song for women and Latinos, and features Mexican-American rapper Kap G.\n\nAfter signing with Def Jam Records, she released her first EP, Summer with Friends, in 2017, followed up by The Plan in 2018. The latter features appearances by rappers YG, Lil Yachty, Lil Baby, and YBN Nahmir. She later released a few more singles such as \"Lil Bebe\", which was remixed featuring vocals from Lil Baby, and \"Easy\", which was remixed featuring vocals from singer Chris Brown. She has also made a cameo appearance in Megan Thee Stallion's \"Hot Girl Summer\" music video. In late 2019, she choreographed for DaBaby’s music video “BOP on Broadway”.\n\nIn January 2021, the singer issued an apology after posting part of a song called \"Yellow Bone\" on social media, which was criticized for promoting colorism.\n\nMusical style\nDaniLeigh incorporates elements of hip hop and Latin music into her primarily R&B-style music.\n\nDiscography\n\nAlbums\n Summer with Friends (2017)\n The Plan (2018)\n My Present (2019)\n Movie (2020)\n In My Feelings (2020)\n\nEPs\n Summer with Friends (2017)\n\nSingles\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial website\n\n1994 births\nLiving people\n21st-century American women singers\nDancers from Florida\nSingers from Florida\nAmerican choreographers\nAmerican contemporary R&B singers\nAmerican female hip hop musicians\nAmerican women pop singers\nAmerican singers of Dominican Republic descent\nDef Jam Recordings artists\n21st-century American singers\nHispanic and Latino American women singers",
"Cha Hyun-ok (; born December 24, 1976), known by her stage name Yuri (), is a South Korean pop singer. Debuting as a singer with Cool (쿨), she later formed Girl Friends with best friend Chae Ri-na after the former group's breakup in 2005. Yuri has since regrouped with Cool.\n\nCareer\nYuri was not an original member of Cool, but was brought in to replace Yoo Chae-yeong for the group's second album. The band's lineup stayed the same from the second album onwards. In 2004, though, Cool was reportedly in danger of breaking up due to tensions within the band. The group eventually broke up after the release of their tenth album in 2005.\n\nA year after the breakup, Yuri announced that she would be joining with close friend Chae Ri-na to become a musical duo, named Girl Friends. Becoming friends in the 1990s while performing with their respective groups, the two had been discussing a possible joint project for 10 years. Girl Friends released their first album, Another Myself, in 2006, with the lead single \"Maybe I Love You\". Their second album, Addict 2 Times, was released in late 2007.\n\nIn 2008, Cool announced that they would be regrouping. Yuri stated that she missed performing their trademark dance songs in the summer, even while still performing as part of Girl Friends. The group then released their 11th album in the summer of 2009.\n\nYuri has set up an online shopping mall with friend Baek Ji-young.\n\nOn October 17, 2012, it was reported that Yuri had been accidentally killed in a fight in Gangnam, Seoul, but this was revealed to be a case of mistaken identity. The real victim was \"Ms. Kang\", the ex-wife of Yuri's Cool bandmate Kim Sung Soo, who was stabbed to death in a fight in a restaurant where she had been meeting with Roo'ra and Girl Friends singer Chae Ri-na. \"Ms. Kang\" and Yuri were supposedly very physically similar, causing a misunderstanding as to the identity of the victim.\n\nReferences\n\n1976 births\nLiving people\nGirl Friends (band) members\nSouth Korean female idols\nSouth Korean women pop singers\n21st-century South Korean singers\n21st-century South Korean women singers\n\nYuri"
] |
[
"Jonas Salk",
"Polio research"
] |
C_9d8df9e61f1d47a6ac49d1f277de652f_0
|
When did he start doing Polio research?
| 1 |
When did Jonas Salk start doing Polio research?
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Jonas Salk
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In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955. The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. CANNOTANSWER
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In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk.
|
Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh looked into patenting the vaccine but, since Salk's techniques were not novel, their patent attorney said "If there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and would be of doubtful value." An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Early life and education
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated when she was twelve. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a renowned child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street, Arverne.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school." In high school "he was known as a perfectionist ... who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." Of the students who graduated, however, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth."
At his mother's urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were "barely second rate." There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. "What made the place special," he writes, "was the student body that had fought so hard to get there... driven by their parents.... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way."
As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews... while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology, which had replaced medicine as his primary interest. He said his desire was to help humankind in general rather than single patients. "It was the laboratory work, in particular, that gave new direction to his life."
Salk has said: "My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis."
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work
In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the Thomas Francis' laboratory at the University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
Polio research
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Becoming a public figure
Celebrity versus privacy
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity", the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented. However, lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Salk served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Author Jon Cohen noted, "Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off."
For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, "at 40, the once obscure scientist ... was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero." He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations, and letters from thousands of fellow citizens. His alma mater, City College of New York, gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Laws. But "despite such very nice tributes", The New York Times wrote, "Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. ... He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist."
During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them."
Maintaining his individuality
"If Salk the scientist sounds austere", wrote The New York Times, "Salk the man is a person of great warmth and tremendous enthusiasm. People who meet him generally like him." A Washington newspaper correspondent commented, "He could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never bought anything before." Award-winning geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him "a renaissance scientist: brilliant, sophisticated, driven ... a fantastic creature."
He enjoys talking to people he likes, and "he likes a lot of people", wrote the Times. "He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs." And "He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money." That belongs "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary", he said.
Establishing the Salk Institute
In the years after Salk's discovery, many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, "helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena 'from cell to society'." Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."
In 1966, Salk described his "ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization." Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
The New York Times, in a 1980 article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, described the current workings at the facility:
At the institute, a magnificent complex of laboratories and study units set on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Dr. Salk holds the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group is concerned with the immunologic aspects of cancer and the mechanisms of autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
In an interview about his future hopes at the institute, he said, "In the end, what may have more significance is my creation of the institute and what will come out of it, because of its example as a place for excellence, a creative environment for creative minds."
Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, was a leading professor at the institute until his death in 2004.
The institute also served as the basis for Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
AIDS vaccine work
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.
Salk's "biophilosophy"
In 1966, The New York Times referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to Times journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and artists have joined the scientists to achieve an understanding of man in all his physical, mental and spiritual complexity. Such interchanges might lead, he would hope, to a new and important school of thinkers he would designate as biophilosophers." Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, at a meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill in 1984 that he was optimistic that ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be developed. Salk said people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society" without progress.
Salk describes his "biophilosophy" as the application of a "biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems." He went into more detail in two of his books, Man Unfolding, and The Survival of the Wisest. In an interview in 1980, he described his thoughts on the subject, including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes:
I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature. ... People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important. ... In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease", he says. "In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we're observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It's much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.
His definition of a "biophilosopher" is "Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives."
Just prior to his death, Salk was working on a new book along the theme of biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind.
Personal life and death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that Donna's father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."
They had three children: Peter (who also became a physician and is now a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh), Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced and, in 1970, Salk married French painter Françoise Gilot.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
Honors and recognition
1955, one month after the vaccine announcement, he was honored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where he was given their "highest award for services" by Governor George M. Leader, Meritorious Service Medal, where the governor added,
... in recognition of his 'historical medical' discovery ... Dr. Salk's achievement is meritorious service of the highest magnitude and dimension for the commonwealth, the country and mankind." The governor, who had three children, said that "as a parent he was 'humbly thankful to Dr. Salk,' and as Governor, 'proud to pay him tribute'.
1955, City University of New York creates the Salk Scholarship fund which it awards to multiple outstanding pre-med students each year
1956, awarded the Lasker Award
1957, the Municipal Hospital building, where Salk conducted his polio research at the University of Pittsburgh, is renamed Jonas Salk Hall and is home to the university's School of Pharmacy and Dentistry.
1958, awarded the James D. Bruce Memorial Award
1958, elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia
1975, awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and the Congressional Gold Medal
1976, awarded the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
1976, named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association
1977, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk's true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks.
1981, decorated by the Italian government on January 3 as a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
1996, the March of Dimes Foundation created an annual $250,000 cash "Prize" to outstanding biologists as a tribute to Salk.
2006, the United States Postal Service issued a 63-cent Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in his honor.
2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Salk into the California Hall of Fame.
2009, BBYO boys chapter chartered in his honor in Scottsdale, Arizona, Named "Jonas Salk AZA #2357"
Schools in Mesa, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Levittown, New York; Old Bridge, New Jersey; Merrillville, Indiana; Sacramento, California ; and Mira Mesa, California ; are named after him.
2012, October 24, in honor of his birthday, has been named "World Polio Day", and was originated by Rotary International over a decade earlier.
2014, On the 100th anniversary of Salk's birth, a Google Doodle was created to honor the physician and medical researcher. The doodle shows happy and healthy children and adults playing and going about their lives with two children hold up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"
Documentary films
In early 2009, the American Public Broadcasting Service aired its new documentary film, American Experience: The Polio Crusade. The documentary, available on DVD, can also be viewed online at PBS's website.
On April 12, 2010, to help celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, a new 66-minute documentary, The Shot Felt 'Round the World, had its world premiere. Directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis, the documentary was conceived by Hollywood screenwriter and producer Carl Kurlander to bring "a fresh perspective on the era."
In 2014, actor and director Robert Redford, who was once struck with a mild case of polio when he was a child, directed a documentary about the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
In Chapter 10 of the 2018 season of Genius Michael McElhatton portrays Salk in a short cameo where he is on a date with Françoise Gilot.
Salk's book publications
Man Unfolding (1972)
Survival of the Wisest (1973)
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981)
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983)
References
Further reading
Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes. Jonas Salk: A Life, Oxford Univ. Press (2015), scholarly biography
Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Berkley Books (2006), history of the polio vaccine
Weintraub, B. "Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and the first vacccine against polio." Israel Chemist and Engineer. July 2020, iss. 6. p31-34
External links
The American Experience: The Polio Crusade video, 1 hr. by PBS
"Legacy of Salk Institute", video, 30 minutes, history of Salk vaccine
"Polio Vaccine" intro., Britannica, video, 1 minute
Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation
Jonas Salk Trust
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Documents regarding Jonas Salk and the Salk Polio Vaccine, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
1985 Open Mind interview with Richard D. Heffner: Man Evolving...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature on Jonas Salk and the Polio cure 50 years later
The Salk School of Science (New York, New York)
Patent US Patent 5,256,767 : Vaccine against HIV
Register of Jonas Salk Papers, 1926–1991 – MSS 1, held in the UC San Diego Library's Special Collections & Archives
1914 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American physicians
American epidemiologists
American humanists
American medical researchers
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American virologists
American Ashkenazi Jews
Burials in California
City College of New York alumni
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Grand Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
History of medicine
Jewish American scientists
Jewish humanists
New York University School of Medicine alumni
People from East Harlem
People from San Diego
Physicians from New York City
Polio
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Townsend Harris High School alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Pittsburgh faculty
Vaccinologists
20th-century American Jews
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"Isabel Merrick Morgan (also Morgan Mountain) (20 August 1911 – 18 August 1996) was an American virologist at Johns Hopkins University, who prepared an experimental vaccine that protected monkeys against polio in a research team with David Bodian and Howard A. Howe. Their research led to the identification of three distinct serotypes of poliovirus, all of which must be incorporated for a vaccine to provide complete immunity from poliomyelitis. Morgan was the first to successfully use a killed-virus for polio inoculation in monkeys. After she married in 1949, she left the field of polio research in part because she was uncomfortable with trials that tested polio vaccines on the nerve tissue of children. She then worked on epidemiological studies on air pollution. Later in life, she was a consultant for studies of cancer therapies at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute.\n\nEarly life and education \n\nIsabel Merrick Morgan was born 20 August 1911, in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Her parents were Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist, and Lilian Vaughan Sampson, an experimental biologist. Isabel Morgan was the youngest of four children. Morgan's mother gave up her scientific career to raise all four children until they were each old enough for her to return to her husband's lab. Although she gave up her career, her and her children faced frequent exposure to visiting biologists who would visit the Morgans' summer vacation home near the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts.\n\nIsabel and her siblings were homeschooled by their mother up until third grade. Among her siblings, Morgan was the only one who followed in the footsteps of her parents by becoming a scientist. Her sisters married other scientists, while her brother became an engineer. Morgan graduated from Stanford University, gained a Masters from Cornell University in 1936, and wrote her doctoral thesis in bacteriology at the University of Pennsylvania, titled Histopathological changes produced in rabbits by experimental inoculation with hemolytic streptococci and certain of their component factors.\n\nCareer and research \nShe joined the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York in 1938. There she worked in Peter Olitsky's lab and did research work on immunity to viral diseases, such as polio and encephalomyelitis. \n\nIn 1944, Morgan joined a group of virologists, including David Bodian, and Howard A. Howe at Johns Hopkins. Between 1944 and 1949, their work led to the identification of three distinct serotypes of poliovirus, all of which must be incorporated for a vaccine to provide complete immunity from poliomyelitis.\nShe also began experiments to immunize monkeys against polio with killed poliovirus grown in nervous tissue and inactivated with formaldehyde. In these experiments, Morgan defined the number of antibodies that needed to circulate in the blood to protect monkeys from an intra-cerebral challenge from the poliovirus. After vaccination with the inactivated virus, the monkeys were able to resist injections with high concentrations of live poliovirus, making Morgan the first to successfully use a killed-virus for polio inoculation in monkeys.\nMaurice Brodie had demonstrated a similar effect of immunity with inactivated virus in 1935, but others had been unable to reproduce his reports, and the approach had been discredited.\n\nIn 1948, Morgan published a paper, with herself as the sole author, that challenged this scientific consensus.\n\nMorgan's work was a key link in the chain of progress toward a killed-virus polio vaccine, one that culminated in the approval of Jonas Salk's vaccine for general use in 1955.\nDavid Oshinsky suggests that Morgan's research was a year or more in advance of Jonas Salk's when she left the field in 1949.\nUntil Morgan did her work, it was believed that only live viruses could convey immunity to polio. Killed/inactivated viruses were already in use for the influenza vaccine, but scientists had been unable to replicate the technique for polio in studies on primates and humans.\nAdditionally, Morgan's research played a role in evaluating the need for \"booster\" doses of the polio vaccine.\n\nLater life \nIn 1949, Morgan left Johns Hopkins and married former Air Force Colonel Joseph Mountain, who was a data processor in New York. The couple moved to Westchester County and Morgan took a job with the county's Department of Laboratory Research. There, she received a grant from the National Institutes of Health, which allowed her to do research on the production of antibodies.\n\nMorgan did not continue her previous polio research, in part because she was uncomfortable with trials that tested polio vaccines on human nerve tissue of children. The technique risked the possibility of autoimmune encephalitis and was later replaced by safer approaches.\nShe did however publish further articles relating to polio, in which she is credited as Isabel Morgan Mountain, PhD., while working with Hattie Alexander, a pediatrician interested in bacterial infections. Alexander led the microbiology laboratory at Babies Hospital, Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York City. There, she hired many women to work in the lab, likely pursuing the assistance of Morgan given her expertise in polio and other viruses. Their first paper was published in 1959.\n\nAfter her stepson Jimmy Mountain was killed in an air crash in 1960, she decided to leave Alexander's lab and eventually earned a master's degree in biostatistics from Columbia University. After leaving polio research, she worked with a variety of individuals, including her husband, on the epidemiological studies of the effects of air pollution. Later, she was a consultant for studies of cancer therapies at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in Manhattan.\n\nMorgan's husband died in 1970, however, she continued research on cancer until 1979. In her later years, she gained custody of her family's home in Wood Hole, and represented her father at commemorative events. Morgan died in 1996, two days before her 85th birthday.\n\nAwards\nIn January 1958, she was inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia. She was and remains the only woman who was so honored for her research work.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \nArchives \n Isabel Morgan Mountain Collection, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland\n Peter K. Olitsky papers at the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania\nPublications by Morgan in\nJEM\nJournal of Immunology\n\n1911 births\n1996 deaths\nAmerican medical researchers\nAmerican virologists\nJohns Hopkins University faculty\nPolio\nVaccinologists\nAmerican women scientists\nCornell University alumni",
"Joseph Louis Melnick (October 9, 1914 – January 7, 2001) was an American epidemiologist who performed breakthrough research on the spread of polio. The New York Times called him \"a founder of modern virology\".\n\nEarly life and education\nMelnick was born on October 9, 1914, in Boston and moved with his family to New Haven, Connecticut, when he was seven years old. He earned his undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University in 1936 and was awarded a Ph.D. in physiological chemistry from Yale University. He became a member of the Yale faculty under John R. Paul, and was named a professor of epidemiology in 1954.\n\nPolio research\nResearch by Melnick found that the most common way polio was spread was by fecal contamination, usually by soiled hands, and that the poliovirus could survive for extended periods in sewage. Other viruses, such as hepatitis, were also found in sewage, leading to improved purification standards. Higher levels of the polio virus were found in sewage during the summer, the same time of year the outbreaks of the disease were at their most severe, which John R. Paul observed \"spoke loudly in favor of the idea that polio viruses circulate widely in the population and environment only during epidemic seasons\". Together with Dorothy Horstmann, Melnick published the results of a study that showed that polio could be transmitted by flies, though they were not the primary vector for the disease. He was among the first to discover that the polio virus belonged to a larger class now known as the enteroviruses — a form of virus that could enter the central nervous system under certain conditions — and was among those who discovered that polio and other enteroviruses only rarely invade the central nervous system.\n\nChief virologist\n\nMelnick was chosen as the chief virologist at the division of biological standards at the National Institutes of Health in 1957. He was hired by the Baylor College of Medicine in 1958 as the first head of the school's department of virology and epidemiology. Research he published in 1960 showed that the form of the attenuated vaccine used in the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin was less harmful to the nervous system than comparable vaccines. A study he performed found that polio vaccine could be stored for long periods by using magnesium chloride as a preservative, eliminating the need for refrigeration. Melnick was named as dean of graduate sciences at Baylor in 1968, a position he held until 1991. Together with heart surgeon Michael E. DeBakey, Melnick investigated the possible effects that cytomegalovirus might have on coronary artery diseases.\nResearch performed by Melnick with a team at Baylor and published in the journal Science in 1968 and later found evidence that implicated viruses, including herpes simplex virus, as a cause of some forms of cervical cancer.\n\nA regimen for the treatment of a polio outbreak in the 1980s in the Gaza Strip and West Bank by a joint effort of Israeli and Palestinian health officials used a combination of live attenuated and inactivated forms of the polio vaccine as recommended by Melnick and Nathan Goldblum, as those receiving as many as four doses of the oral polio vaccine alone were still susceptible to polio.\n\nOn January 2, 1958, Melnick was one of 17 people inducted into the Polio Hall of Fame at Warm Springs, Georgia together with 10 other European and American polio experts.\n\nAn editor of multiple scientific journals, Melnick wrote and edited the section on virology in a standard text on microbiology. Melnick was recognized by the Sabin Vaccine Institute in 1996 with its Albert B. Sabin Gold Medal, recognizing his pioneering research in the study of polio and the more than 100 virologists he trained during his career.\n\nMelnick died at age 86 on January 7, 2001, in Houston, as a result of complications of Alzheimer's disease. He was survived by his wife, Matilda Benyesh-Melnick, his daughter and granddaughter.\n\nSee also\n History of poliomyelitis\n\nReferences\n\n1914 births\n2001 deaths\nAmerican virologists\nBaylor College of Medicine faculty\nAmerican public health doctors\nPeople from Houston\nPhysicians from New Haven, Connecticut\nWesleyan University alumni\nVaccinologists\nPolio"
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"Jonas Salk",
"Polio research",
"When did he start doing Polio research?",
"In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk."
] |
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What was the first part of his research?
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What was the first part of Jonas Salk's research?
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Jonas Salk
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In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955. The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. CANNOTANSWER
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He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers.
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Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh looked into patenting the vaccine but, since Salk's techniques were not novel, their patent attorney said "If there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and would be of doubtful value." An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Early life and education
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated when she was twelve. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a renowned child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street, Arverne.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school." In high school "he was known as a perfectionist ... who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." Of the students who graduated, however, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth."
At his mother's urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were "barely second rate." There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. "What made the place special," he writes, "was the student body that had fought so hard to get there... driven by their parents.... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way."
As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews... while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology, which had replaced medicine as his primary interest. He said his desire was to help humankind in general rather than single patients. "It was the laboratory work, in particular, that gave new direction to his life."
Salk has said: "My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis."
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work
In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the Thomas Francis' laboratory at the University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
Polio research
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Becoming a public figure
Celebrity versus privacy
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity", the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented. However, lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Salk served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Author Jon Cohen noted, "Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off."
For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, "at 40, the once obscure scientist ... was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero." He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations, and letters from thousands of fellow citizens. His alma mater, City College of New York, gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Laws. But "despite such very nice tributes", The New York Times wrote, "Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. ... He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist."
During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them."
Maintaining his individuality
"If Salk the scientist sounds austere", wrote The New York Times, "Salk the man is a person of great warmth and tremendous enthusiasm. People who meet him generally like him." A Washington newspaper correspondent commented, "He could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never bought anything before." Award-winning geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him "a renaissance scientist: brilliant, sophisticated, driven ... a fantastic creature."
He enjoys talking to people he likes, and "he likes a lot of people", wrote the Times. "He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs." And "He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money." That belongs "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary", he said.
Establishing the Salk Institute
In the years after Salk's discovery, many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, "helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena 'from cell to society'." Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."
In 1966, Salk described his "ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization." Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
The New York Times, in a 1980 article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, described the current workings at the facility:
At the institute, a magnificent complex of laboratories and study units set on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Dr. Salk holds the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group is concerned with the immunologic aspects of cancer and the mechanisms of autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
In an interview about his future hopes at the institute, he said, "In the end, what may have more significance is my creation of the institute and what will come out of it, because of its example as a place for excellence, a creative environment for creative minds."
Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, was a leading professor at the institute until his death in 2004.
The institute also served as the basis for Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
AIDS vaccine work
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.
Salk's "biophilosophy"
In 1966, The New York Times referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to Times journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and artists have joined the scientists to achieve an understanding of man in all his physical, mental and spiritual complexity. Such interchanges might lead, he would hope, to a new and important school of thinkers he would designate as biophilosophers." Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, at a meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill in 1984 that he was optimistic that ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be developed. Salk said people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society" without progress.
Salk describes his "biophilosophy" as the application of a "biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems." He went into more detail in two of his books, Man Unfolding, and The Survival of the Wisest. In an interview in 1980, he described his thoughts on the subject, including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes:
I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature. ... People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important. ... In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease", he says. "In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we're observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It's much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.
His definition of a "biophilosopher" is "Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives."
Just prior to his death, Salk was working on a new book along the theme of biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind.
Personal life and death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that Donna's father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."
They had three children: Peter (who also became a physician and is now a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh), Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced and, in 1970, Salk married French painter Françoise Gilot.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
Honors and recognition
1955, one month after the vaccine announcement, he was honored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where he was given their "highest award for services" by Governor George M. Leader, Meritorious Service Medal, where the governor added,
... in recognition of his 'historical medical' discovery ... Dr. Salk's achievement is meritorious service of the highest magnitude and dimension for the commonwealth, the country and mankind." The governor, who had three children, said that "as a parent he was 'humbly thankful to Dr. Salk,' and as Governor, 'proud to pay him tribute'.
1955, City University of New York creates the Salk Scholarship fund which it awards to multiple outstanding pre-med students each year
1956, awarded the Lasker Award
1957, the Municipal Hospital building, where Salk conducted his polio research at the University of Pittsburgh, is renamed Jonas Salk Hall and is home to the university's School of Pharmacy and Dentistry.
1958, awarded the James D. Bruce Memorial Award
1958, elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia
1975, awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and the Congressional Gold Medal
1976, awarded the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
1976, named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association
1977, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk's true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks.
1981, decorated by the Italian government on January 3 as a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
1996, the March of Dimes Foundation created an annual $250,000 cash "Prize" to outstanding biologists as a tribute to Salk.
2006, the United States Postal Service issued a 63-cent Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in his honor.
2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Salk into the California Hall of Fame.
2009, BBYO boys chapter chartered in his honor in Scottsdale, Arizona, Named "Jonas Salk AZA #2357"
Schools in Mesa, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Levittown, New York; Old Bridge, New Jersey; Merrillville, Indiana; Sacramento, California ; and Mira Mesa, California ; are named after him.
2012, October 24, in honor of his birthday, has been named "World Polio Day", and was originated by Rotary International over a decade earlier.
2014, On the 100th anniversary of Salk's birth, a Google Doodle was created to honor the physician and medical researcher. The doodle shows happy and healthy children and adults playing and going about their lives with two children hold up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"
Documentary films
In early 2009, the American Public Broadcasting Service aired its new documentary film, American Experience: The Polio Crusade. The documentary, available on DVD, can also be viewed online at PBS's website.
On April 12, 2010, to help celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, a new 66-minute documentary, The Shot Felt 'Round the World, had its world premiere. Directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis, the documentary was conceived by Hollywood screenwriter and producer Carl Kurlander to bring "a fresh perspective on the era."
In 2014, actor and director Robert Redford, who was once struck with a mild case of polio when he was a child, directed a documentary about the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
In Chapter 10 of the 2018 season of Genius Michael McElhatton portrays Salk in a short cameo where he is on a date with Françoise Gilot.
Salk's book publications
Man Unfolding (1972)
Survival of the Wisest (1973)
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981)
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983)
References
Further reading
Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes. Jonas Salk: A Life, Oxford Univ. Press (2015), scholarly biography
Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Berkley Books (2006), history of the polio vaccine
Weintraub, B. "Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and the first vacccine against polio." Israel Chemist and Engineer. July 2020, iss. 6. p31-34
External links
The American Experience: The Polio Crusade video, 1 hr. by PBS
"Legacy of Salk Institute", video, 30 minutes, history of Salk vaccine
"Polio Vaccine" intro., Britannica, video, 1 minute
Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation
Jonas Salk Trust
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Documents regarding Jonas Salk and the Salk Polio Vaccine, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
1985 Open Mind interview with Richard D. Heffner: Man Evolving...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature on Jonas Salk and the Polio cure 50 years later
The Salk School of Science (New York, New York)
Patent US Patent 5,256,767 : Vaccine against HIV
Register of Jonas Salk Papers, 1926–1991 – MSS 1, held in the UC San Diego Library's Special Collections & Archives
1914 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American physicians
American epidemiologists
American humanists
American medical researchers
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American virologists
American Ashkenazi Jews
Burials in California
City College of New York alumni
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Grand Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
History of medicine
Jewish American scientists
Jewish humanists
New York University School of Medicine alumni
People from East Harlem
People from San Diego
Physicians from New York City
Polio
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Townsend Harris High School alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Pittsburgh faculty
Vaccinologists
20th-century American Jews
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[
"Norman Robert Campbell (1880–1949) was an English physicist and philosopher of science.\n\nEarly life\nNorman Robert Campbell was born in 1880. He was the son of William Middleton Campbell, Governor of the Bank of England, and his wife Edith Agneta Bevan. He was educated at Eton College and at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1902.\n\nCareer\nCampbell became a fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1902. He was also a research assistant at the Cavendish Laboratory under the direction of J. J. Thomson. He became an honorary fellow in physics research at Leeds University in 1913, then worked from 1919 to 1944 as a member of the research staff at the Hirst Research Centre of the General Electric Company England, set up in Wembly Middlesex in 1919. While at Hirst Research he encouraged unqualified staff to further their scientific knowledge by the loan and gift of books used during his own studies.\n\nWorks\nCampbell's 1921 book, What Is Science?, was written with the professed aim of encouraging the study of science in the classes of the Workers' Educational Association. This book is a short introduction to the philosophy of science aimed at a lay audience. Other than attempting to answer the question raised in the title of the book, it tries to answer some of the central questions of the philosophy of science, such as \"what is a law of nature?\" and \"what is measurement\".\n\nOther publications by Campbell include Modern Electrical Theory (1907 with supplementary chapters 1921-23), The Principles of Electricity (1912) and An Account of the Principles of Measurement and Calculation (1928). His most important work on the philosophy of science was his Physics: The Elements, published in 1919 (reissued by Dover as Foundations of Science: The Philosophy of Theory and Experiment in 1957). This work consists of the first two parts of a planned five-part work that was never completed. In this book Campbell developed his thesis that a critical analysis of science might not require any philosophy at all, but that an investigation of the meaning of reality and truth in science as opposed to metaphysics might be fruitful. Campbell believed that what might be considered \"truth\" in the realm of science might not be applicable at all in other fields.\n\nViews\nCampbell had a particular regard for the ideas and teaching ability of Michael Faraday. He considered that the fundamental function of a scientific theory was to develop and explain laws, defined as uniformities discovered by hypothesis, observation and experiment and verifiable from experience. He also maintained that, to be useful, such laws should display some analogy to other known laws developed by the scientific method.\n\nDeath\nCampbell died in 1949.\n\nNotes\n\nSee also\nCampbell's theorem\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\n1880 births\n1949 deaths\nPeople educated at Eton College\nAlumni of Trinity College, Cambridge\nEnglish physicists\nEnglish science writers\nEnglish philosophers\n20th-century British philosophers\nPhilosophers of science",
"Philip Linnaes Boyd (October 8, 1900 – September 9, 1989) was the first mayor of Palm Springs, California, a regent of the University of California and the namesake of the Deep Canyon Desert Research Center.\n\nPersonal life\nPhilip Boyd was born October 8, 1900, in Richmond, Indiana, the son of lawyer and corporate executive Linnaes Cox Boyd and Mary Thomas Spencer, daughter of prominent businessman William F. Spencer. Boyd fell ill and was forced to drop out of Wabash College, where he was a student. In 1921 his parents brought him to Palm Springs in the hope the dry climate would help him recover. According to Boyd, his long illness forced him to consider what he would do with his life once he was healed. Boyd started work as a secretary for the Palm Springs Chamber of Commerce and opened the first branch of Bank of America in Palm Springs. During the Great Depression Boyd was able to delve into real estate, buying ranch lands in the area of Deep Canyon. In 1953 Boyd, who was on the board of trustees for the Palm Springs Art Museum, leased property for a nature reserve now part of the Living Desert Zoo and Gardens. Boyd encouraged faculty from the newly opened University of California, Riverside to use his nature reserve for research only to realize his public nature reserve was not a fitting setting for academic research. In 1958 Boyd donated another parcel of land and funding to purchase a total of in Deep Canyon to open what is now the research center. The University of California has since acquired other contiguous property to expand the research area to its current size. The acquired lands were named after Boyd in 1961. Clark Kerr (then the President of the University) and Herman Spieth (the chancellor of the Riverside campus) commented that the reservation would allow ongoing research to continue in ecosystems threatened by urban sprawl. Boyd and his wife donated funds in 1966 to support the construction of UCR's carillon and bell tower. Boyd's memoir is archived at UCR in the Special Collections Department of Rivera Library. Boyd and his wife also donated a set of silver Towle salt and pepper shakers to the Indianapolis Museum of Art.\n\nPolitical life\nBoyd was instrumental in incorporating Palm Springs, serving as the town's first mayor from 1938 to 1942. He ran unopposed for a seat in the California State Assembly, representing Riverside in what had been then called the 76th Assembly District from 1945 to 1949. While an assemblyman, Boyd voted to establish University of California, Riverside. As a member of California's State Public Works Boards Boyd participated in the logistical process of establishing the UCR campus. In 1950 was elected chairman of the California Republican Party's central committee, beating out the serving vice-chairman who would traditionally have been elected. In 1957 Goodwin J. Knight, then Governor of California, appointed Boyd as a Regent of the University of California system. Boyd resigned his position as regent April 1, 1970 after new laws changed the financial disclosure requirements for state officials.\n\nCitations\n\nMayors of Palm Springs, California\nMembers of the California State Assembly\nUniversity of California regents\n1900 births\n1989 deaths\nCalifornia Republican Party chairs\nPeople from Rancho Mirage, California\nPeople from Richmond, Indiana\nWabash College alumni\n20th-century American politicians\nCalifornia Republicans"
] |
[
"Jonas Salk",
"Polio research",
"When did he start doing Polio research?",
"In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk.",
"What was the first part of his research?",
"He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers."
] |
C_9d8df9e61f1d47a6ac49d1f277de652f_0
|
Did he find out if there were more than three types?
| 3 |
Did Jonas Salk find out if there were more than three types of polio?
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Jonas Salk
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In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955. The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh looked into patenting the vaccine but, since Salk's techniques were not novel, their patent attorney said "If there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and would be of doubtful value." An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Early life and education
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated when she was twelve. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a renowned child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street, Arverne.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school." In high school "he was known as a perfectionist ... who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." Of the students who graduated, however, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth."
At his mother's urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were "barely second rate." There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. "What made the place special," he writes, "was the student body that had fought so hard to get there... driven by their parents.... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way."
As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews... while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology, which had replaced medicine as his primary interest. He said his desire was to help humankind in general rather than single patients. "It was the laboratory work, in particular, that gave new direction to his life."
Salk has said: "My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis."
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work
In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the Thomas Francis' laboratory at the University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
Polio research
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Becoming a public figure
Celebrity versus privacy
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity", the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented. However, lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Salk served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Author Jon Cohen noted, "Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off."
For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, "at 40, the once obscure scientist ... was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero." He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations, and letters from thousands of fellow citizens. His alma mater, City College of New York, gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Laws. But "despite such very nice tributes", The New York Times wrote, "Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. ... He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist."
During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them."
Maintaining his individuality
"If Salk the scientist sounds austere", wrote The New York Times, "Salk the man is a person of great warmth and tremendous enthusiasm. People who meet him generally like him." A Washington newspaper correspondent commented, "He could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never bought anything before." Award-winning geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him "a renaissance scientist: brilliant, sophisticated, driven ... a fantastic creature."
He enjoys talking to people he likes, and "he likes a lot of people", wrote the Times. "He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs." And "He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money." That belongs "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary", he said.
Establishing the Salk Institute
In the years after Salk's discovery, many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, "helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena 'from cell to society'." Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."
In 1966, Salk described his "ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization." Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
The New York Times, in a 1980 article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, described the current workings at the facility:
At the institute, a magnificent complex of laboratories and study units set on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Dr. Salk holds the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group is concerned with the immunologic aspects of cancer and the mechanisms of autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
In an interview about his future hopes at the institute, he said, "In the end, what may have more significance is my creation of the institute and what will come out of it, because of its example as a place for excellence, a creative environment for creative minds."
Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, was a leading professor at the institute until his death in 2004.
The institute also served as the basis for Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
AIDS vaccine work
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.
Salk's "biophilosophy"
In 1966, The New York Times referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to Times journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and artists have joined the scientists to achieve an understanding of man in all his physical, mental and spiritual complexity. Such interchanges might lead, he would hope, to a new and important school of thinkers he would designate as biophilosophers." Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, at a meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill in 1984 that he was optimistic that ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be developed. Salk said people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society" without progress.
Salk describes his "biophilosophy" as the application of a "biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems." He went into more detail in two of his books, Man Unfolding, and The Survival of the Wisest. In an interview in 1980, he described his thoughts on the subject, including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes:
I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature. ... People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important. ... In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease", he says. "In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we're observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It's much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.
His definition of a "biophilosopher" is "Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives."
Just prior to his death, Salk was working on a new book along the theme of biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind.
Personal life and death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that Donna's father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."
They had three children: Peter (who also became a physician and is now a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh), Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced and, in 1970, Salk married French painter Françoise Gilot.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
Honors and recognition
1955, one month after the vaccine announcement, he was honored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where he was given their "highest award for services" by Governor George M. Leader, Meritorious Service Medal, where the governor added,
... in recognition of his 'historical medical' discovery ... Dr. Salk's achievement is meritorious service of the highest magnitude and dimension for the commonwealth, the country and mankind." The governor, who had three children, said that "as a parent he was 'humbly thankful to Dr. Salk,' and as Governor, 'proud to pay him tribute'.
1955, City University of New York creates the Salk Scholarship fund which it awards to multiple outstanding pre-med students each year
1956, awarded the Lasker Award
1957, the Municipal Hospital building, where Salk conducted his polio research at the University of Pittsburgh, is renamed Jonas Salk Hall and is home to the university's School of Pharmacy and Dentistry.
1958, awarded the James D. Bruce Memorial Award
1958, elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia
1975, awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and the Congressional Gold Medal
1976, awarded the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
1976, named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association
1977, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk's true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks.
1981, decorated by the Italian government on January 3 as a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
1996, the March of Dimes Foundation created an annual $250,000 cash "Prize" to outstanding biologists as a tribute to Salk.
2006, the United States Postal Service issued a 63-cent Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in his honor.
2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Salk into the California Hall of Fame.
2009, BBYO boys chapter chartered in his honor in Scottsdale, Arizona, Named "Jonas Salk AZA #2357"
Schools in Mesa, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Levittown, New York; Old Bridge, New Jersey; Merrillville, Indiana; Sacramento, California ; and Mira Mesa, California ; are named after him.
2012, October 24, in honor of his birthday, has been named "World Polio Day", and was originated by Rotary International over a decade earlier.
2014, On the 100th anniversary of Salk's birth, a Google Doodle was created to honor the physician and medical researcher. The doodle shows happy and healthy children and adults playing and going about their lives with two children hold up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"
Documentary films
In early 2009, the American Public Broadcasting Service aired its new documentary film, American Experience: The Polio Crusade. The documentary, available on DVD, can also be viewed online at PBS's website.
On April 12, 2010, to help celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, a new 66-minute documentary, The Shot Felt 'Round the World, had its world premiere. Directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis, the documentary was conceived by Hollywood screenwriter and producer Carl Kurlander to bring "a fresh perspective on the era."
In 2014, actor and director Robert Redford, who was once struck with a mild case of polio when he was a child, directed a documentary about the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
In Chapter 10 of the 2018 season of Genius Michael McElhatton portrays Salk in a short cameo where he is on a date with Françoise Gilot.
Salk's book publications
Man Unfolding (1972)
Survival of the Wisest (1973)
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981)
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983)
References
Further reading
Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes. Jonas Salk: A Life, Oxford Univ. Press (2015), scholarly biography
Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Berkley Books (2006), history of the polio vaccine
Weintraub, B. "Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and the first vacccine against polio." Israel Chemist and Engineer. July 2020, iss. 6. p31-34
External links
The American Experience: The Polio Crusade video, 1 hr. by PBS
"Legacy of Salk Institute", video, 30 minutes, history of Salk vaccine
"Polio Vaccine" intro., Britannica, video, 1 minute
Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation
Jonas Salk Trust
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Documents regarding Jonas Salk and the Salk Polio Vaccine, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
1985 Open Mind interview with Richard D. Heffner: Man Evolving...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature on Jonas Salk and the Polio cure 50 years later
The Salk School of Science (New York, New York)
Patent US Patent 5,256,767 : Vaccine against HIV
Register of Jonas Salk Papers, 1926–1991 – MSS 1, held in the UC San Diego Library's Special Collections & Archives
1914 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American physicians
American epidemiologists
American humanists
American medical researchers
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American virologists
American Ashkenazi Jews
Burials in California
City College of New York alumni
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Grand Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
History of medicine
Jewish American scientists
Jewish humanists
New York University School of Medicine alumni
People from East Harlem
People from San Diego
Physicians from New York City
Polio
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Townsend Harris High School alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Pittsburgh faculty
Vaccinologists
20th-century American Jews
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[
"In mathematics, hypergeometric identities are equalities involving sums over hypergeometric terms, i.e. the coefficients occurring in hypergeometric series. These identities occur frequently in solutions to combinatorial problems, and also in the analysis of algorithms. \n\nThese identities were traditionally found 'by hand'. There exist now several algorithms which can find and prove all hypergeometric identities.\n\nExamples\n\nDefinition \nThere are two definitions of hypergeometric terms, both used in different cases as explained below. See also hypergeometric series.\n\nA term tk is a hypergeometric term if\n \n\nis a rational function in k.\n\nA term F(n,k) is a hypergeometric term if\n \n\nis a rational function in k.\n\nThere exist two types of sums over hypergeometric terms, the definite and indefinite sums. A definite sum is of the form\n \n\nThe indefinite sum is of the form\n\nProofs \nAlthough in the past one has found proofs of certain identities there exist several algorithms to find and prove identities. These algorithms first find a simple expression for a sum over hypergeometric terms and then provide a certificate which anyone could use to easily check and prove the correctness of the identity.\n\nFor each of the hypergeometric sum types there exist one or more methods to find a simple expression. These methods also provide a certificate to easily check the proof of an identity:\n Definite sums: Sister Celine's Method, Zeilberger's algorithm\n Indefinite sums: Gosper's algorithm\n\nA book named A = B has been written by Marko Petkovšek, Herbert Wilf and Doron Zeilberger describing the three main approaches described above.\n\nSee also\n Table of Newtonian series\n\nExternal links \n The book \"A = B\", this book is freely downloadable from the internet.\n Special-functions examples at exampleproblems.com\n\nFactorial and binomial topics\nHypergeometric functions\nMathematical identities\nfr:Identités hypergéométriques",
"Projective Set (sometimes shortened to ProSet) is a real-time card game derived from the older game Set.\nThe deck contains cards consisting of colored dots; some cards are laid out on the table and players attempt to find \"Sets\" among them.\nThe word projective comes from the game's relation to Projective spaces over the finite field with two elements.\n\nProjective Set has been studied mathematically as well as played recreationally.\nIt has been a popular game at Canada/USA Mathcamp.\n\nRules \n\nA Projective Set card has six binary attributes, or bits, generally represented by colored dots. For each color of dot,\neach card either has that dot or does not.\nThere is one card for each possible combination of dots except the combination of no dots at all,\nmaking cards total.\n\nThree cards are said to form a \"set\" if the total number of dots of each color is either 0 or 2.\nSimilarly, four or more cards form a \"set\" if the number of dots of each color is an even number.\n\nA card and itself could be said to form a two-card set, but as the cards in the deck are all distinct, this\ndoes not arise in actual gameplay.\n\nOriginal Version \n\nIn the original version, as in Set, 12 cards are laid out on the table.\nThe first player to find three cards which form a set and call out \"set\" takes the three cards.\nThree new cards are then dealt and the play continues until the deck is depleted.\n\nIf at any time the players agree there is no set among the cards, three new cards can be dealt, bringing\nthe total number of cards on the table to 15. Other than this, new cards are not dealt out unless the\nnumber of cards on the table goes below 12.\n\nThe game ends when the deck is depleted and no more sets can be found among the cards on the\ntable. The player who captured the most sets is the winner.\n\n7-card Version \n\nA variation of the game, more popular than the original, allows sets of any size, rather than just sets of size three.\n7 cards are put out on the table at a time, and when a set is found (with anywhere from 3-7 cards),\nall the cards from the set are taken and then replaced.\nPoints are generally given at the end according to how many cards each player captured rather than how many sets.\n\nIt turns out that among any 7 cards there is a set, under these rules, so there is no extra rule necessary for the case that no\nset can be found.\n\nMathematics \n\nThe cards of a Projective Set deck can be thought of as nonzero vectors in the finite vector space\n.\nThe collection of all such vectors is the finite projective space with order 2 and dimension 5.\nThree cards form a set if and only if the corresponding points are collinear in that space.\nMore generally, in the variant, cards form a set if and only if the corresponding vectors\nadd to the zero vector.\n\nIn Set, there can exist 20 cards out of the 81 without a set, but no more.\nIn Projective Set, there can exist up to 32 out of the 63 cards with no (3-card) set.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Projective Set (the variant in which sets of size larger than 3 are allowed) can be played online at\nvarious sites, including: , , .\n\n A multiplayer online version is available under the name Proset at the following site\n A race-the-clock online version is available at the following site\n\n The game was marketed online in April 2012 under the name Zero sumZ.\n The game was marketed online since 2011 under the name Socks.\n The game was marketed online since 2020 under the name ProSet.\nAn article written in 2011 about Projective Set.\n A website to generate custom Pro set decks.\n Dedicated deck card games\nRecreational mathematics"
] |
[
"Jonas Salk",
"Polio research",
"When did he start doing Polio research?",
"In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk.",
"What was the first part of his research?",
"He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers.",
"Did he find out if there were more than three types?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_9d8df9e61f1d47a6ac49d1f277de652f_0
|
What did he discover in his research?
| 4 |
What did Jonas Salk discover in his research on polio?
|
Jonas Salk
|
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955. The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. CANNOTANSWER
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The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
|
Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh looked into patenting the vaccine but, since Salk's techniques were not novel, their patent attorney said "If there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and would be of doubtful value." An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Early life and education
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated when she was twelve. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a renowned child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street, Arverne.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school." In high school "he was known as a perfectionist ... who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." Of the students who graduated, however, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth."
At his mother's urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were "barely second rate." There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. "What made the place special," he writes, "was the student body that had fought so hard to get there... driven by their parents.... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way."
As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews... while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology, which had replaced medicine as his primary interest. He said his desire was to help humankind in general rather than single patients. "It was the laboratory work, in particular, that gave new direction to his life."
Salk has said: "My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis."
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work
In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the Thomas Francis' laboratory at the University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
Polio research
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Becoming a public figure
Celebrity versus privacy
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity", the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented. However, lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Salk served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Author Jon Cohen noted, "Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off."
For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, "at 40, the once obscure scientist ... was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero." He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations, and letters from thousands of fellow citizens. His alma mater, City College of New York, gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Laws. But "despite such very nice tributes", The New York Times wrote, "Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. ... He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist."
During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them."
Maintaining his individuality
"If Salk the scientist sounds austere", wrote The New York Times, "Salk the man is a person of great warmth and tremendous enthusiasm. People who meet him generally like him." A Washington newspaper correspondent commented, "He could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never bought anything before." Award-winning geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him "a renaissance scientist: brilliant, sophisticated, driven ... a fantastic creature."
He enjoys talking to people he likes, and "he likes a lot of people", wrote the Times. "He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs." And "He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money." That belongs "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary", he said.
Establishing the Salk Institute
In the years after Salk's discovery, many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, "helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena 'from cell to society'." Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."
In 1966, Salk described his "ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization." Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
The New York Times, in a 1980 article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, described the current workings at the facility:
At the institute, a magnificent complex of laboratories and study units set on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Dr. Salk holds the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group is concerned with the immunologic aspects of cancer and the mechanisms of autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
In an interview about his future hopes at the institute, he said, "In the end, what may have more significance is my creation of the institute and what will come out of it, because of its example as a place for excellence, a creative environment for creative minds."
Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, was a leading professor at the institute until his death in 2004.
The institute also served as the basis for Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
AIDS vaccine work
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.
Salk's "biophilosophy"
In 1966, The New York Times referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to Times journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and artists have joined the scientists to achieve an understanding of man in all his physical, mental and spiritual complexity. Such interchanges might lead, he would hope, to a new and important school of thinkers he would designate as biophilosophers." Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, at a meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill in 1984 that he was optimistic that ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be developed. Salk said people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society" without progress.
Salk describes his "biophilosophy" as the application of a "biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems." He went into more detail in two of his books, Man Unfolding, and The Survival of the Wisest. In an interview in 1980, he described his thoughts on the subject, including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes:
I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature. ... People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important. ... In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease", he says. "In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we're observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It's much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.
His definition of a "biophilosopher" is "Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives."
Just prior to his death, Salk was working on a new book along the theme of biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind.
Personal life and death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that Donna's father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."
They had three children: Peter (who also became a physician and is now a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh), Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced and, in 1970, Salk married French painter Françoise Gilot.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
Honors and recognition
1955, one month after the vaccine announcement, he was honored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where he was given their "highest award for services" by Governor George M. Leader, Meritorious Service Medal, where the governor added,
... in recognition of his 'historical medical' discovery ... Dr. Salk's achievement is meritorious service of the highest magnitude and dimension for the commonwealth, the country and mankind." The governor, who had three children, said that "as a parent he was 'humbly thankful to Dr. Salk,' and as Governor, 'proud to pay him tribute'.
1955, City University of New York creates the Salk Scholarship fund which it awards to multiple outstanding pre-med students each year
1956, awarded the Lasker Award
1957, the Municipal Hospital building, where Salk conducted his polio research at the University of Pittsburgh, is renamed Jonas Salk Hall and is home to the university's School of Pharmacy and Dentistry.
1958, awarded the James D. Bruce Memorial Award
1958, elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia
1975, awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and the Congressional Gold Medal
1976, awarded the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
1976, named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association
1977, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk's true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks.
1981, decorated by the Italian government on January 3 as a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
1996, the March of Dimes Foundation created an annual $250,000 cash "Prize" to outstanding biologists as a tribute to Salk.
2006, the United States Postal Service issued a 63-cent Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in his honor.
2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Salk into the California Hall of Fame.
2009, BBYO boys chapter chartered in his honor in Scottsdale, Arizona, Named "Jonas Salk AZA #2357"
Schools in Mesa, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Levittown, New York; Old Bridge, New Jersey; Merrillville, Indiana; Sacramento, California ; and Mira Mesa, California ; are named after him.
2012, October 24, in honor of his birthday, has been named "World Polio Day", and was originated by Rotary International over a decade earlier.
2014, On the 100th anniversary of Salk's birth, a Google Doodle was created to honor the physician and medical researcher. The doodle shows happy and healthy children and adults playing and going about their lives with two children hold up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"
Documentary films
In early 2009, the American Public Broadcasting Service aired its new documentary film, American Experience: The Polio Crusade. The documentary, available on DVD, can also be viewed online at PBS's website.
On April 12, 2010, to help celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, a new 66-minute documentary, The Shot Felt 'Round the World, had its world premiere. Directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis, the documentary was conceived by Hollywood screenwriter and producer Carl Kurlander to bring "a fresh perspective on the era."
In 2014, actor and director Robert Redford, who was once struck with a mild case of polio when he was a child, directed a documentary about the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
In Chapter 10 of the 2018 season of Genius Michael McElhatton portrays Salk in a short cameo where he is on a date with Françoise Gilot.
Salk's book publications
Man Unfolding (1972)
Survival of the Wisest (1973)
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981)
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983)
References
Further reading
Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes. Jonas Salk: A Life, Oxford Univ. Press (2015), scholarly biography
Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Berkley Books (2006), history of the polio vaccine
Weintraub, B. "Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and the first vacccine against polio." Israel Chemist and Engineer. July 2020, iss. 6. p31-34
External links
The American Experience: The Polio Crusade video, 1 hr. by PBS
"Legacy of Salk Institute", video, 30 minutes, history of Salk vaccine
"Polio Vaccine" intro., Britannica, video, 1 minute
Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation
Jonas Salk Trust
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Documents regarding Jonas Salk and the Salk Polio Vaccine, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
1985 Open Mind interview with Richard D. Heffner: Man Evolving...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature on Jonas Salk and the Polio cure 50 years later
The Salk School of Science (New York, New York)
Patent US Patent 5,256,767 : Vaccine against HIV
Register of Jonas Salk Papers, 1926–1991 – MSS 1, held in the UC San Diego Library's Special Collections & Archives
1914 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American physicians
American epidemiologists
American humanists
American medical researchers
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American virologists
American Ashkenazi Jews
Burials in California
City College of New York alumni
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Grand Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
History of medicine
Jewish American scientists
Jewish humanists
New York University School of Medicine alumni
People from East Harlem
People from San Diego
Physicians from New York City
Polio
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Townsend Harris High School alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Pittsburgh faculty
Vaccinologists
20th-century American Jews
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[
"Jonathan Levy is an American author known for his work in the fields of influence and adventure. With the intention of bringing together exceptional people, Levy used his understanding of social interaction to create the Influencers Dinner, a secret dining experience for taste makers, thought leaders and influencers from different industries. Levy's work in human behavior has garnered him a reputation as one of the leading super connectors in America.\n\nCareer\nLevy's research mostly focuses on what affects decision making. He works out of C Lab collaborating with neuroscientist Moran Cerf, of the Kellogg School of Management. Levy spent years modeling the behavior of people at every level of influence, in order to better understand what causes them to engage and connect. His models for engagement are what led to the creation of the Influencers Dinner. and Inspired Culture: The Salon. Levy's most recent research relates to the dating statistics. His team anonymized over a billion data points, from the dating app Hinge, to discover what leads people to take their online connections and move them into in person relationships. Levy has spoken at many conferences including TED and Fortune's Brainstorm Health.\n\nThe 2AM Principle\nOn November 8, 2016, Levy's first book, The 2 AM Principle: Discover the Science of Adventure was published by Regan Arts and distributed by Simon & Schuster. The book explores research on what causes people to live exciting lives and how this could be used to let people enjoy their lives more. The book was received positively by media being featured in many major outlets. In the book Levy combines personal stories with research and what he calls the EPIC Model of Adventure, a four-stage process that every adventure goes through. Research ranges from work by Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman exploring the Peak–end rule and how it relates to the memory of enjoyment, to risky behavior and its relationship to speed of thinning.\n\nLevy asserts that for an experience to be considered an adventure, it must meet three criteria:\n It is exciting and remarkable;\n Possesses adversity and/or risk;\n Brings about growth;\n\nHis book breaks down an adventure into the following 4 stages:\n\nPersonal life \nBetween 2014 and 2015, Levy was recognized as both one of \"New York City's Most Successful Bachelors\" by Gotham Magazine and one of the \"41 Most Eligible Bachelors\" in America by Elle Magazine.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOfficial Website\n\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nAmerican consultants\nAmerican male writers\nAmerican media personalities",
"In Search of My Father: The Journey of a Child Holocaust Survivor is a 2010 book by a Holocaust survivor Paul Drexler. The book chronicles the author's research about his father's death during a British bombardment days before German capitulation.\n\nSummary\nIn 1944, Drexler and his family were taken by the Gestapo to a labor camp in Sereď. The family was separated a few months later when Drexler and his mother were sent to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Drexler never saw his father, Eugen again. The family had evidence that Eugen died on 3 May 1945 in a death certificate, but knew no details. They soon immigrated to Australia.\n\nIn the mid 1990s, Drexler was presenting his story to Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. It was during this recounting of events that Drexler realized he wanted to research and discover what happened to his father. His research took him throughout Europe, where he discovered that Eugen was killed in the Bay of Lübeck only a couple days before Germany surrendered.\n\nReception\nThe Sydney Morning Herald praised In Search of My Father as \"full of powerful moments, told simply, with disturbing openness\". A review in The Australian illustrates the book's \"painful reminder that when nations go to war, it is invariably the innocent who suffer most\".\n\nReferences\n\nPersonal accounts of the Holocaust\n2010 non-fiction books\nJewish literature\nAustralian non-fiction books"
] |
[
"Jonas Salk",
"Polio research",
"When did he start doing Polio research?",
"In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk.",
"What was the first part of his research?",
"He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers.",
"Did he find out if there were more than three types?",
"I don't know.",
"What did he discover in his research?",
"The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955."
] |
C_9d8df9e61f1d47a6ac49d1f277de652f_0
|
When did the first person get the vaccine?
| 5 |
When did the first person get the polio vaccine?
|
Jonas Salk
|
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive. In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines. Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporarily by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine. After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the retarded and feeble-minded. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955. The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two and a half years. Salk's inactivated polio vaccine was the first vaccine for the disease; it came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. CANNOTANSWER
|
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children, Salk injected 43 children
|
Jonas Edward Salk (; born Jonas Salk; October 28, 1914June 23, 1995) was an American virologist and medical researcher who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines. He was born in New York City and attended the City College of New York and New York University School of Medicine.
In 1947, Salk accepted a professorship in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. It was there that he undertook a project to determine the number of different types of poliovirus, starting in 1948. For the next seven years, Salk devoted himself towards developing a vaccine against polio.
Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution. The National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis and the University of Pittsburgh looked into patenting the vaccine but, since Salk's techniques were not novel, their patent attorney said "If there were any patentable novelty to be found in this phase it would lie within an extremely narrow scope and would be of doubtful value." An immediate rush to vaccinate began in both the United States and around the world. Many countries began polio immunization campaigns using Salk's vaccine, including Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Belgium. By 1959, the Salk vaccine had reached about 90 countries. An attenuated live oral polio vaccine was developed by Albert Sabin, coming into commercial use in 1961. Less than 25 years after the release of Salk's vaccine, domestic transmission of polio had been eliminated in the United States.
In 1963, Salk founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research. He continued to conduct research and publish books in his later years, focusing in his last years on the search for a vaccine against HIV. Salk also campaigned vigorously for mandatory vaccination throughout the rest of his life, calling the universal vaccination of children against disease a "moral commitment". Salk's personal papers are today stored in Geisel Library at the University of California, San Diego.
Early life and education
Jonas Salk was born in New York City to Daniel and Dora (née Press) Salk. His parents were Ashkenazi Jewish; Daniel was born in New Jersey to immigrant parents and Dora, who was born in Minsk, emigrated when she was twelve. Salk's parents did not receive extensive formal education. Jonas had two younger brothers, Herman and Lee, a renowned child psychologist. The family moved from East Harlem to 853 Elsmere Place, the Bronx, with some time spent in Queens at 439 Beach 69th Street, Arverne.
When he was 13, Salk entered Townsend Harris High School, a public school for intellectually gifted students. Named after the founder of City College of New York (CCNY), it was, wrote his biographer, Dr. David Oshinsky, "a launching pad for the talented sons of immigrant parents who lacked the money—and pedigree—to attend a top private school." In high school "he was known as a perfectionist ... who read everything he could lay his hands on," according to one of his fellow students. Students had to cram a four-year curriculum into just three years. As a result, most dropped out or flunked out, despite the school's motto "study, study, study." Of the students who graduated, however, most had the grades to enroll in CCNY, noted for being a highly competitive college.
Education
Salk enrolled in CCNY, from which he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry in 1934. Oshinsky writes that "for working-class immigrant families, City College represented the apex of public higher education. Getting in was tough, but tuition was free. Competition was intense, but the rules were fairly applied. No one got an advantage based on an accident of birth."
At his mother's urging, he put aside aspirations of becoming a lawyer and instead concentrated on classes necessary for admission to medical school. However, according to Oshinsky, the facilities at City College were "barely second rate." There were no research laboratories. The library was inadequate. The faculty contained few noted scholars. "What made the place special," he writes, "was the student body that had fought so hard to get there... driven by their parents.... From these ranks, of the 1930s and 1940s, emerged a wealth of intellectual talent, including more Nobel Prize winners—eight—and PhD recipients than any other public college except the University of California at Berkeley." Salk entered CCNY at the age of 15, a "common age for a freshman who had skipped multiple grades along the way."
As a child, Salk did not show any interest in medicine or science in general. He said in an interview with the Academy of Achievement, "As a child I was not interested in science. I was merely interested in things human, the human side of nature, if you like, and I continue to be interested in that."
Medical school
After City College, Salk enrolled in New York University to study medicine. According to Oshinsky, NYU based its modest reputation on famous alumni, such as Walter Reed, who helped conquer yellow fever. Tuition was "comparatively low, better still, it did not discriminate against Jews... while most of the surrounding medical schools—Cornell, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—had rigid quotas in place." Yale, for example, accepted 76 applicants in 1935 out of a pool of 501. Although 200 of the applicants were Jewish, only five got in. During his years at New York University Medical School, Salk worked as a laboratory technician during the school year and as a camp counselor in the summer.
During Salk's medical studies, he stood out from his peers, according to Bookchin, "not just because of his continued academic prowess—he was Alpha Omega Alpha, the Phi Beta Kappa Society of medical education—but because he had decided he did not want to practice medicine." Instead, he became absorbed in research, even taking a year off to study biochemistry. He later focused more of his studies on bacteriology, which had replaced medicine as his primary interest. He said his desire was to help humankind in general rather than single patients. "It was the laboratory work, in particular, that gave new direction to his life."
Salk has said: "My intention was to go to medical school, and then become a medical scientist. I did not intend to practice medicine, although in medical school, and in my internship, I did all the things that were necessary to qualify me in that regard. I had opportunities along the way to drop the idea of medicine and go into science. At one point at the end of my first year of medical school, I received an opportunity to spend a year in research and teaching in biochemistry, which I did. And at the end of that year, I was told that I could, if I wished, switch and get a Ph.D. in biochemistry, but my preference was to stay with medicine. And, I believe that this is all linked to my original ambition, or desire, which was to be of some help to humankind, so to speak, in a larger sense than just on a one-to-one basis."
Concerning his last year of medical school, Salk said: "I had an opportunity to spend time in elective periods in my last year in medical school, in a laboratory that was involved in studies on influenza. The influenza virus had just been discovered about a few years before that. And, I saw the opportunity at that time to test the question as to whether we could destroy the virus infectivity and still immunize. And so, by carefully designed experiments, we found it was possible to do so."
Postgraduate research and early laboratory work
In 1941, during his postgraduate work in virology, Salk chose a two-month elective to work in the Thomas Francis' laboratory at the University of Michigan. Francis had recently joined the faculty of the medical school after working for the Rockefeller Foundation, where he had discovered the type B influenza virus. According to Bookchin, "the two-month stint in Francis's lab was Salk's first introduction to the world of virology—and he was hooked." After graduating from medical school, Salk began his residency at New York's prestigious Mount Sinai Hospital, where he again worked in Francis's laboratory. Salk then worked at the University of Michigan School of Public Health with Francis, on an army-commissioned project in Michigan to develop an influenza vaccine. He and Francis eventually perfected a vaccine that was soon widely used at army bases, where Salk discovered and isolated one of the strains of influenza that was included in the final vaccine.
Polio research
In 1947, Salk became ambitious for his own lab and was granted one at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, but the lab was smaller than he had hoped and he found the rules imposed by the university restrictive.
In 1948, Harry Weaver, the director of research at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, contacted Salk. He asked Salk to find out if there were more types of polio than the three then known, offering additional space, equipment and researchers. For the first year he gathered supplies and researchers including Julius Youngner, Byron Bennett, L. James Lewis, and secretary Lorraine Friedman joined Salk's team, as well. As time went on, Salk began securing grants from the Mellon family and was able to build a working virology laboratory. He later joined the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis's polio project established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Extensive publicity and fear of polio led to much increased funding, $67 million by 1955, but research continued on dangerous live vaccines.
Salk decided to use the safer 'killed' virus, instead of weakened forms of strains of polio viruses like the ones used contemporaneously by Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral vaccine.
After successful tests on laboratory animals, on July 2, 1952, assisted by the staff at the D.T. Watson Home for Crippled Children (now the Watson Institute), Salk injected 43 children with his killed-virus vaccine. A few weeks later, Salk injected children at the Polk State School for the Retarded and Feeble-minded. He vaccinated his own children in 1953. In 1954 he tested the vaccine on about one million children, known as the polio pioneers. The vaccine was announced as safe on April 12, 1955.
The project became large, involving 100 million contributors to the March of Dimes, and 7 million volunteers. The foundation allowed itself to go into debt to finance the final research required to develop the Salk vaccine. Salk worked incessantly for two-and-a-half years.
Salk's inactivated polio vaccine came into use in 1955. It is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines.
Becoming a public figure
Celebrity versus privacy
Salk preferred not to have his career as a scientist affected by too much personal attention, as he had always tried to remain independent and private in his research and life, but this proved to be impossible. "Young man, a great tragedy has befallen you—you've lost your anonymity", the television personality Ed Murrow said to Salk shortly after the onslaught of media attention. When Murrow asked him, "Who owns this patent?", Salk replied, "Well, the people I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" The vaccine is calculated to be worth $7 billion had it been patented. However, lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis did look into the possibility of a patent, but ultimately determined that the vaccine was not a patentable invention because of prior art.
Salk served on the board of directors of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Author Jon Cohen noted, "Jonas Salk made scientists and journalists alike go goofy. As one of the only living scientists whose face was known the world over, Salk, in the public's eye, had a superstar aura. Airplane pilots would announce that he was on board and passengers would burst into applause. Hotels routinely would upgrade him into their penthouse suites. A meal at a restaurant inevitably meant an interruption from an admirer, and scientists approached him with drop-jawed wonder as though some of the stardust might rub off."
For the most part, however, Salk was "appalled at the demands on the public figure he has become and resentful of what he considers to be the invasion of his privacy", wrote The New York Times, a few months after his vaccine announcement. The Times article noted, "at 40, the once obscure scientist ... was lifted from his laboratory almost to the level of a folk hero." He received a presidential citation, a score of awards, four honorary degrees, half a dozen foreign decorations, and letters from thousands of fellow citizens. His alma mater, City College of New York, gave him an honorary degree as Doctor of Laws. But "despite such very nice tributes", The New York Times wrote, "Salk is profoundly disturbed by the torrent of fame that has descended upon him. ... He talks continually about getting out of the limelight and back to his laboratory ... because of his genuine distaste for publicity, which he believes is inappropriate for a scientist."
During a 1980 interview, 25 years later, he said, "It's as if I've been a public property ever since, having to respond to external, as well as internal, impulses. ... It's brought me enormous gratification, opened many opportunities, but at the same time placed many burdens on me. It altered my career, my relationships with colleagues; I am a public figure, no longer one of them."
Maintaining his individuality
"If Salk the scientist sounds austere", wrote The New York Times, "Salk the man is a person of great warmth and tremendous enthusiasm. People who meet him generally like him." A Washington newspaper correspondent commented, "He could sell me the Brooklyn Bridge, and I never bought anything before." Award-winning geneticist Walter Nelson-Rees called him "a renaissance scientist: brilliant, sophisticated, driven ... a fantastic creature."
He enjoys talking to people he likes, and "he likes a lot of people", wrote the Times. "He talks quickly, articulately, and often in complete paragraphs." And "He has very little perceptible interest in the things that interest most people—such as making money." That belongs "in the category of mink coats and Cadillacs—unnecessary", he said.
Establishing the Salk Institute
In the years after Salk's discovery, many supporters, in particular the National Foundation, "helped him build his dream of a research complex for the investigation of biological phenomena 'from cell to society'." Called the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, it opened in 1963 in the San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla, in a purpose-built facility designed by the architect Louis Kahn. Salk believed that the institution would help new and upcoming scientists along in their careers, as he said himself, "I thought how nice it would be if a place like this existed and I was invited to work there."
In 1966, Salk described his "ambitious plan for the creation of a kind of Socratic academy where the supposedly alienated two cultures of science and humanism will have a favorable atmosphere for cross-fertilization." Author and journalist Howard Taubman explained:
The New York Times, in a 1980 article celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, described the current workings at the facility:
At the institute, a magnificent complex of laboratories and study units set on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, Dr. Salk holds the titles of founding director and resident fellow. His own laboratory group is concerned with the immunologic aspects of cancer and the mechanisms of autoimmune disease, such as multiple sclerosis, in which the immune system attacks the body's own tissues.
In an interview about his future hopes at the institute, he said, "In the end, what may have more significance is my creation of the institute and what will come out of it, because of its example as a place for excellence, a creative environment for creative minds."
Francis Crick, codiscoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule, was a leading professor at the institute until his death in 2004.
The institute also served as the basis for Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar's 1979 book Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts.
AIDS vaccine work
Beginning in the mid-1980s, Salk engaged in research to develop a vaccine for AIDS. He cofounded The Immune Response Corporation (IRC) with Kevin Kimberlin and patented Remune, an immunologic therapy, but was unable to secure liability insurance for the product. The project was discontinued in 2007, twelve years after Salk's death.
Salk's "biophilosophy"
In 1966, The New York Times referred to him as the "Father of Biophilosophy." According to Times journalist and author Howard Taubman, "he never forgets ... there is a vast amount of darkness for man to penetrate. As a biologist, he believes that his science is on the frontier of tremendous new discoveries; and as a philosopher, he is convinced that humanists and artists have joined the scientists to achieve an understanding of man in all his physical, mental and spiritual complexity. Such interchanges might lead, he would hope, to a new and important school of thinkers he would designate as biophilosophers." Salk told his cousin, Joel Kassiday, at a meeting of the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future on Capitol Hill in 1984 that he was optimistic that ways to prevent most human and animal diseases would eventually be developed. Salk said people must be prepared to take prudent risks, since "a risk-free society would become a dead-end society" without progress.
Salk describes his "biophilosophy" as the application of a "biological, evolutionary point of view to philosophical, cultural, social and psychological problems." He went into more detail in two of his books, Man Unfolding, and The Survival of the Wisest. In an interview in 1980, he described his thoughts on the subject, including his feeling that a sharp rise and an expected leveling off in the human population would take place and eventually bring a change in human attitudes:
I think of biological knowledge as providing useful analogies for understanding human nature. ... People think of biology in terms of such practical matters as drugs, but its contribution to knowledge about living systems and ourselves will in the future be equally important. ... In the past epoch, man was concerned with death, high mortality; his attitudes were antideath, antidisease", he says. "In the future, his attitudes will be expressed in terms of prolife and prohealth. The past was dominated by death control; in the future, birth control will be more important. These changes we're observing are part of a natural order and to be expected from our capacity to adapt. It's much more important to cooperate and collaborate. We are the co-authors with nature of our destiny.
His definition of a "biophilosopher" is "Someone who draws upon the scriptures of nature, recognizing that we are the product of the process of evolution, and understands that we have become the process itself, through the emergence and evolution of our consciousness, our awareness, our capacity to imagine and anticipate the future, and to choose from among alternatives."
Just prior to his death, Salk was working on a new book along the theme of biophilosophy, privately reported to be titled Millennium of the Mind.
Personal life and death
The day after his graduation from medical school in 1939, Salk married Donna Lindsay, a master's candidate at the New York College of Social Work. David Oshinsky writes that Donna's father, Elmer Lindsay, "a wealthy Manhattan dentist, viewed Salk as a social inferior, several cuts below Donna's former suitors." Eventually, her father agreed to the marriage on two conditions: first, Salk must wait until he could be listed as an official M.D. on the wedding invitations, and second, he must improve his "rather pedestrian status" by giving himself a middle name."
They had three children: Peter (who also became a physician and is now a part-time professor of infectious diseases at the University of Pittsburgh), Darrell, and Jonathan Salk. In 1968, they divorced and, in 1970, Salk married French painter Françoise Gilot.
Jonas Salk died from heart failure at the age of 80 on June 23, 1995, in La Jolla, and was buried at El Camino Memorial Park in San Diego.
Honors and recognition
1955, one month after the vaccine announcement, he was honored by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where he was given their "highest award for services" by Governor George M. Leader, Meritorious Service Medal, where the governor added,
... in recognition of his 'historical medical' discovery ... Dr. Salk's achievement is meritorious service of the highest magnitude and dimension for the commonwealth, the country and mankind." The governor, who had three children, said that "as a parent he was 'humbly thankful to Dr. Salk,' and as Governor, 'proud to pay him tribute'.
1955, City University of New York creates the Salk Scholarship fund which it awards to multiple outstanding pre-med students each year
1956, awarded the Lasker Award
1957, the Municipal Hospital building, where Salk conducted his polio research at the University of Pittsburgh, is renamed Jonas Salk Hall and is home to the university's School of Pharmacy and Dentistry.
1958, awarded the James D. Bruce Memorial Award
1958, elected to the Polio Hall of Fame, which was dedicated in Warm Springs, Georgia
1975, awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru Award and the Congressional Gold Medal
1976, awarded the Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award
1976, named the Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association
1977, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Jimmy Carter, with the following statement accompanying the medal:
Because of Doctor Jonas E. Salk, our country is free from the cruel epidemics of poliomyelitis that once struck almost yearly. Because of his tireless work, untold hundreds of thousands who might have been crippled are sound in body today. These are Doctor Salk's true honors, and there is no way to add to them. This Medal of Freedom can only express our gratitude, and our deepest thanks.
1981, decorated by the Italian government on January 3 as a Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
1996, the March of Dimes Foundation created an annual $250,000 cash "Prize" to outstanding biologists as a tribute to Salk.
2006, the United States Postal Service issued a 63-cent Distinguished Americans series postage stamp in his honor.
2007, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver inducted Salk into the California Hall of Fame.
2009, BBYO boys chapter chartered in his honor in Scottsdale, Arizona, Named "Jonas Salk AZA #2357"
Schools in Mesa, Arizona; Spokane, Washington; Tulsa, Oklahoma; Bolingbrook, Illinois; Levittown, New York; Old Bridge, New Jersey; Merrillville, Indiana; Sacramento, California ; and Mira Mesa, California ; are named after him.
2012, October 24, in honor of his birthday, has been named "World Polio Day", and was originated by Rotary International over a decade earlier.
2014, On the 100th anniversary of Salk's birth, a Google Doodle was created to honor the physician and medical researcher. The doodle shows happy and healthy children and adults playing and going about their lives with two children hold up a sign saying, "Thank you, Dr. Salk!"
Documentary films
In early 2009, the American Public Broadcasting Service aired its new documentary film, American Experience: The Polio Crusade. The documentary, available on DVD, can also be viewed online at PBS's website.
On April 12, 2010, to help celebrate the 55th anniversary of the Salk vaccine, a new 66-minute documentary, The Shot Felt 'Round the World, had its world premiere. Directed by Tjardus Greidanus and produced by Laura Davis, the documentary was conceived by Hollywood screenwriter and producer Carl Kurlander to bring "a fresh perspective on the era."
In 2014, actor and director Robert Redford, who was once struck with a mild case of polio when he was a child, directed a documentary about the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
In Chapter 10 of the 2018 season of Genius Michael McElhatton portrays Salk in a short cameo where he is on a date with Françoise Gilot.
Salk's book publications
Man Unfolding (1972)
Survival of the Wisest (1973)
World Population and Human Values: A New Reality (1981)
Anatomy of Reality: Merging of Intuition and Reason (1983)
References
Further reading
Jacobs, Charlotte DeCroes. Jonas Salk: A Life, Oxford Univ. Press (2015), scholarly biography
Kluger, Jeffrey. Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio, Berkley Books (2006), history of the polio vaccine
Weintraub, B. "Jonas Salk (1914-1995) and the first vacccine against polio." Israel Chemist and Engineer. July 2020, iss. 6. p31-34
External links
The American Experience: The Polio Crusade video, 1 hr. by PBS
"Legacy of Salk Institute", video, 30 minutes, history of Salk vaccine
"Polio Vaccine" intro., Britannica, video, 1 minute
Jonas Salk Legacy Foundation
Jonas Salk Trust
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Documents regarding Jonas Salk and the Salk Polio Vaccine, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
1985 Open Mind interview with Richard D. Heffner: Man Evolving...
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette feature on Jonas Salk and the Polio cure 50 years later
The Salk School of Science (New York, New York)
Patent US Patent 5,256,767 : Vaccine against HIV
Register of Jonas Salk Papers, 1926–1991 – MSS 1, held in the UC San Diego Library's Special Collections & Archives
1914 births
1995 deaths
20th-century American physicians
American epidemiologists
American humanists
American medical researchers
American people of Belarusian-Jewish descent
American virologists
American Ashkenazi Jews
Burials in California
City College of New York alumni
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Grand Officers of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
History of medicine
Jewish American scientists
Jewish humanists
New York University School of Medicine alumni
People from East Harlem
People from San Diego
Physicians from New York City
Polio
Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
Recipients of the Lasker-DeBakey Clinical Medical Research Award
Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Salk Institute for Biological Studies people
Scientists from New York City
Scientists from Pittsburgh
Townsend Harris High School alumni
University of Michigan faculty
University of Pittsburgh faculty
Vaccinologists
20th-century American Jews
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"HVTN 505 is a clinical trial testing an HIV vaccine regimen on research participants. The trial is conducted by the HIV Vaccine Trials Network and sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Vaccinations were stopped in April 2013 due to initial results showing that the vaccine was ineffective in preventing HIV infections and lowering viral load among those participants who had become infected with HIV. All study participants will continue to be monitored for safety and any long-term effects.\n\nOrganizers\nThe study is sponsored by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the HIV Vaccine Trials Network (HVTN) is conducting the trial. The Vaccine Research Center (VRC) developed the vaccines being researched in the trial. The research sites were in the following places:\n\nAnnandale, Virginia\nAtlanta\nAurora, Colorado\nBethesda, Maryland\nBirmingham, Alabama\nBoston\nChicago\nCleveland\nDallas \nDecatur, Georgia\nHouston\nLos Angeles\nOrlando\nNashville\nNew York City\nPhiladelphia\nRochester, New York\nSan Francisco\nSeattle\n\nPurpose\nHVTN 505 is being conducted to determine the safety and efficacy of a Vaccine Research Center DNA/rAd5 vaccine regimen in healthy males and male-to-female transgender persons who have sex with men. All participants must be fully circumcised, and must have no evidence of previous infection with Adenovirus 5, which is a common virus that causes colds and respiratory infections. Potential participants were tested for antibodies to Adenovirus 5 as part of the screening process to determine their eligibility.\n\nWhen the study began the primary outcome being measured was whether the vaccine decreased the viral load, which is amount of HIV in the blood of study participants who received the vaccine then later became infected with HIV. At that time, researchers stated that the vaccine was very unlikely to provide any protection from HIV infection. In August 2011 because of new data from other clinical trials, NIAID shifted the focus of the study to determine whether vaccination was also able to prevent HIV infection. As a result of this change to the research questions, NIAID also announced an expansion in the desired enrollment to a total of 2200 participants. The study was further expanded to 2500 participants in 2012 to ensure that there would be enough data to meaningfully answer the research questions.\n\nStudy design\nHVTN 505 is a phase IIB, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trial. The original 2009 design was for 1,350 volunteers to participate and for half to get the experimental vaccine and half to get placebo. The study's enrollment target was expanded to 2,200 in 2011 to gather additional data which would allow researchers to determine the extent to which the vaccine regimen also protected against infection. When the vaccinations were stopped on April 23, 2013, the study had enrolled 2,504 volunteers at 21 sites in 19 cities in the United States.\n\nVolunteers wanting to join the trial had to meet the following criteria: must be a man who has sex with men or a trans woman (with or without sex reassignment surgery) who has sex with men, between 18 and 50 years old, HIV negative, fully circumcised, and without detectable antibodies to adenovirus type 5 (which would mean that the person had no evidence of prior adenovirus type 5 infection). The criteria about circumcision and adenovirus antibodies were added as a precaution in light of the results of the prior STEP study. In STEP, uncircumcised men with Ad 5 antibodies contracted HIV more often than the control group, and HVTN 505 researchers responded by only recruiting circumcised men with no Ad 5 antibodies.\n\nThe study regimen started with a set of three immunizations over eight weeks. These three injections were with a DNA vaccine which was intended to prime the immune system. This vaccine contained genetic material artificially modeled after - but not containing or derived from - surface and internal structures of HIV. 24 weeks (6 months) after a volunteer began the study regimen, that person would get a single injection of the study vaccine. This vaccine was a recombinant DNA vaccine based on adenovirus 5 as a live vector vaccine which was carrying artificial genetic material matching HIV antigens of the three major HIV subtypes.\n\nVaccinations stopped\nOn 22 April 2013 the independent data safety monitoring board (DSMB) conducted a scheduled interim review of unblinded data from the study. They concluded that the vaccine regimen had met the definitions for futility that were stated in the study protocol. As a result, they recommend that researchers should no longer administer any study injections and the HVTN and NIAID agreed. Vaccinations were halted the following day, April 23, 2013. In addition, HVTN and NIAID felt that the participants should be told whether they had received the experimental vaccine regimen (unblinded), and the study sites began contacting participants on April 26 to provide this information.\n\nThe DSMB review also noted that more persons who received the vaccine became infected than those in the control group - 41 persons among the vaccinated and 30 among the placebo recipients. Further consideration only of participants who were diagnosed after having been in the study 28 weeks - which is the time required for the vaccine regimen to reach its potential - found that the vaccine group had 27 HIV infections compared to 21 infections in the placebo group. These differences are not statistically significant, but all participants were asked to remain in the study for the full-time planned so that researchers can monitor their safety and continue to learn as much as possible.\n\nReaction\nWhen the results were announced, persons who called the result disappointing include Anthony Fauci, Mitchell Warren of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, and HVTN 505 study leader Scott Hammer.\n\nOne of the participants, Josh Robbins, who became infected during the study reported that he was happy to have been in the study because it allowed him to become diagnosed and receive treatment more quickly than is typical. He also released a statement saying, this is just a finding, not a failure.\n\nSome media organizations speculated that a possible cause for the failure in the study is its use of an adenovirus 5 booster, which was also used in an earlier trial called the STEP study. In the STEP study, participants who received the vaccine contracted HIV at a rate that was significantly higher than placebo recipients. In the HVTN 505 study participants who received the vaccine contracted HIV at a rate that was slightly (i.e. not statistically significantly) higher number than those in the placebo arm of the study. The vaccines used in HVTN 505 are different from the ones used in the Step Study. Additionally, the studies were done with different populations and in different geographical areas.\n\nScientific results \nEven though the vaccines did not work the way the study designers hoped, there continues to be valuable scientific information gleaned from information and specimens gathered as a part of this study. For example, people with one type of immune response to the vaccines that was particularly strong seemed to be less likely to become HIV infected than those who did not have this kind of immune response. This makes us think that the vaccines did make a difference, even though they did not prevent HIV infection overall. \n\nThe raw datasets used in published analysis from HVTN 505 are now publicly available. These include data used in the original efficacy analysis, as well as recent studies describing the effects of the vaccines used on the immune responses of participants.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nofficial page at ClinicalTrials.gov\nHVTN's 505 flyer\na page of Frequently Asked Questions about the study\n\nHIV vaccine research\nClinical trials related to HIV\nClinical trials sponsored by NIAID\n2010s in science",
"Vaccine-induced seropositivity (VISP) is the phenomenon wherein a person who has received a vaccine against a disease would thereafter give a positive or reactive test result for having that disease when tested for it, despite not actually having the disease. This happens because many vaccines encourage the body to produce antibodies against a particular disease, and blood tests often determine whether a person has those antibodies, regardless of whether they came from the infection or just a vaccination.\n\nVISP is especially a concern in vaccine trials for HIV vaccine research because people who give a positive result in an HIV test, even if that result is because of a vaccine and not because of an infection, may face discrimination because of HIV infection.\n\nHIV\n\nBackground\nIn 1987 in America the first HIV vaccine was tested. HIV vaccines have been tested continually worldwide since then, but thus far, no one has developed any vaccine which reduces a person's risk of contracting HIV if exposed to that virus.\n\nMany HIV tests work not by checking a person's blood for HIV, but rather by determining whether the body's own antibodies against HIV are present in the blood. Most HIV vaccines are designed with the intent to promote the body's own production of antibodies which would combat HIV. Regardless of whether they are effective at stimulating the production of antibodies which fight HIV, they usually do cause the body to produce antibodies which standard HIV tests recognize as the antibodies which an HIV positive person would produce in response to HIV infection.\n\nA person who is HIV negative, and has received an HIV vaccine, and who then tests as positive in an HIV test is said to be positive because of VISP.\n\nSignificance\nWhen an HIV-negative person exhibits VISP and gets an HIV-positive result from a test then that person may have difficulty donating blood or negotiating for a life insurance policy.\n\nBetween 1987 and 2003 the number of persons who received experimental HIV vaccinations was about 10,000, and this number was considered small. The difficulties in determining the difference between antibodies produced by HIV infection and vaccine-induced antibodies were managed by individual vaccine research sites who had special capability to conduct additional laboratory testing on this small pool of vaccine recipients. However, at this time two new studies, the STEP Study in the US and the RV 144 study in Thailand, greatly increased the number of people who received HIV vaccinations by another 4600 people. There came to be an increased need to raise awareness of VISP because more people were exhibiting it.\n\nAt the 2010 International AIDS conference presenters talked about the need for community healthcare providers to understand that if their patients have been in an HIV vaccine trial then their patients are likely to give a false positive HIV test result.\n\nHIV VISP in developing countries\nHIV vaccine research happens worldwide to ensure that any vaccine which researchers develop could be used for people worldwide. In developing countries with limited access to healthcare, the problems associated with VISP are a special concern.\n\nResearchers from Africa, Asia, North America, and South America have said that getting local government and media support of the research is essential in addition to creating facilities for distinguishing between HIV positive individuals and individuals exhibiting VISP.\n\nLikelihood\nPeople who participate in vaccine trials which test HIV vaccines may exhibit VISP for years or for the rest of their lives.\n\nA study done on participants in the HIV Vaccine Trials Network HIV vaccination studies showed that among 2176 HIV negative participants who received a vaccine, 908 (42%) had VISP. However, the occurrence of VISP varied depending on what kind of vaccine the participants received.\n\nHepatitis B\nWhen a person gets a hepatitis B vaccine then the most common test for hepatitis B will show them to be positive. The usual course of action, in this case, is to give the person a panel of tests for HBsAg, anti-HBc, and anti-HBs (hepatitis B surface antigen, anti-hepatitis B core, and anti-hepatitis B surface). A person who has never been exposed to hepatitis B but has gotten the vaccine will be positive for anti-HBs but negative for the other two tests in the panel. Other combinations of positive and negative in this test can mean other things, such as acute, chronic, or past infection.\n\nOther conditions\nVISP is not often a practical concern for other diseases because in most cases good vaccines already exist and most people who have access to healthcare receive them. Also physicians do not routinely test people for recent infections with most diseases as they do for HIV.Medical literature on VISP for most diseases is not widely available because there is little practical need for doing that research.\n\nReferences\n\nSurender Khurana, Needham J, Mathieson B, Rodriguez-Chavez IR, Catanzaro AT, Bailer RT, Kim J, Polonis V, Cooper DA, Guerin J, Peterson ML, Gurwith M, Nguyen N, Graham BS, Golding H. Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) Vaccine Trials: a Novel Assay for Differential Diagnosis of HIV Infections in the Face of Vaccine-Generated Antibodies. J. Virol. (2006); 80(5): 2092–99./>\n\nSurender Khurana, Needham J, Park S, Mathieson B, Busch MP, Nemo G, Nyambi P, Zolla-Pazner S, Laal S, Mulenga J, Chomba E, Hunter E, Allen S, McIntyre J, Hewlett I, Lee S, Tang S, Cowan E, Beyrer C, Altfeld M, Yu XG, Tounkara A, Koita O, Kamali A, Nguyen N, Graham BS, Todd D, Mugenyi P, Anzala O, Sanders E, Ketter N, Fast P, Golding H. HIV-SELECTEST, A Novel approach for differential diagnosis of HIV infections in the face of vaccine generated antibodies: Utility for detection of diverse HIV-1 subtype. JAIDS (2006); 43(3): 304–12./>\n\nSurender Khurana, Norris PJ, Busch MP, Haynes BF, Park S, Sasono P, Mlisana K, Salim AK, Hecht FM, Mulenga J, Chomba E, Hunter E, Allen S, Nemo G, Rodriguez-Chavez IR; Women's Interagency HIV Study Collaborative Study Group, Margolick JB; Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), Golding H. HIV-SELECTEST EIA and Rapid Test: Utility for detection of seroconversion following acute HIV-1 infections. J. Clin. Microb. (2010); 48(1):281-85./>\n\nExternal links\n frequently asked questions about HIV vaccine VISP\n\nVaccination\nHIV/AIDS\nHIV vaccine research"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity"
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
Why did they resist?
| 1 |
Why did the Naga people resist?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Leah Ashton is an Australian author of contemporary romance. In 2014, she received Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for Best Short Contemporary Series Romance for Why Resist a Rebel?.\n\nBiography\nAshton lives in Perth, Western Australia and works as an IT Project Manager at a university.\n\nBibliography\n\nStand-alone works\n \n \n \n \n \n Out Run the Night. Leah Ashton. March 2020. \n Defiant. Leah Ashton. April 2019.\n\nAwards and reception\n\n 2014 – Romance Writers of America RITA Award for Best Short Contemporary Series Romance for Why Resist a Rebel?\n 2020 – Romance Writers of Australia Ruby Award for Romantic Suspense for Out Run the Night\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Author's Blog\n Author's Website\n\nLiving people\n21st-century Australian novelists\nAustralian women novelists\nAustralian romantic fiction writers\nRITA Award winners\nYear of birth missing (living people)\n21st-century Australian women writers\nWomen romantic fiction writers",
"Adeshola Mos-Shogbamimu (; born November 1975) is a British Nigerian activist, political commentator, author and lawyer. She is a qualified New York Attorney and Solicitor of England & Wales. A regular speaker on women's rights, law, politics, diversity, inequality and exclusion. Her debut book, This is Why I Resist, was described in The Telegraph as \"an unapologetic declaration that black identity will no longer be defined by white supremacy, and an unfettered call to action to revolutionise the narrative around the black experience in our day-to-day lives.\"\n\nBiography\nMos-Shogbamimu was born in Hackney, London, was raised in Nigeria and the United States, and lived in East Africa when her mother was working for the Commonwealth of Nations. Speaking of how she has been influenced by her Nigerian heritage, she has said: \"My parents brought me up with a really strong identity of who I am and so I have never felt inferior due to the colour of my skin, being a woman or gender. I would use the word feminist to describe my father. He was the first male feminist I knew.\"\n\nAt the age of 19 she obtained her first degree, LLB Hons, from the University of Buckingham, going on to earn an MA degree in Diplomatic Studies from the University of Westminster, an LLM degree in Commercial & Corporate Law from the London School of Economics, a PhD in Law from Birkbeck, University of London, and an Executive MBA from the University of Cambridge. She is also founder of the Women in Leadership Publication. In June 2020 Vogue magazine named her among \"8 Educational Black Voices To Listen And Learn From Now\".\n\nMos-Shogbamimu appears regularly on television as a commentator on issues related to politics, current affairs, race and diversity. She has been particularly outspoken about the negative media treatment of women of colour who are in the public eye, such as Serena Williams and Meghan Markle. In 2019 Mos-Shogbamimu delivered a TEDx Talk entitled \"This is why I resist\", in which she made clear why she refuses to be defined by the colour of her skin, her gender or religion, engaging her audience with bold views on feminism and politics, and encouragement to join her \"conscious revolution\". In March 2021 she clashed with Piers Morgan in a heated debate when she was a guest on Good Morning Britain discussing the Oprah with Meghan and Harry interview.\n\nHer first book, This Is Why I Resist: Don’t Define My Black Identity, was published in January 2021 and tackles the nuances and intricacies of the \"race, racism and race inclusion\" conversations. The New European newspaper said the book is \"a deep dive into the roots of racism in the UK and US, delving into little-explored areas. It's a powerful, challenging polemic: David Lammy describes it as 'recalibrat[ing] the conversation of race to ignite transformational change'.\" Characterised by The Voice newspaper as a \"vital anti-racism call to action\" in which Mos-Shogbamimu is \"direct, unapologetic and urgent in her message\", the book This Is Why I Resist \"tackles head on topics that aren’t discussed enough like colourism, performative allyship, racial gatekeeping, the exclusion of trans women, specifically Black trans women from the feminist movement and urges people to raise their voices to end the oppression.\"\n\nPersonal life\nShola Mos-Shogbamimu is married and has three daughters. She is the grand-daughter of the late Nigerian Monarch of Ogere-Remo, Oba Alfred Obafuwa Babington-Ashaye, Legunsen III, the Ologere of Ogere. She is the daughter of the late Prince Adebajo Babington-Ashaye and Mrs Morenike Babington-Ashaye.\n\nBibliography\n This Is Why I Resist: Don’t Define My Black Identity, London: Headline, 2021, .\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Official website\n \"Unpicking the film industry's diversity crisis\", Amanpour, CNN.\n Isobel Lewis, \"Piers Morgan branded a 'petty, fragile man baby' by GMB guest over Meghan Markle comment\", The Independent, 22 February 2021.\n\nBritish people of Nigerian descent\nAlumni of the University of Buckingham\nAlumni of the London School of Economics\nAlumni of the University of Westminster\nAlumni of Birkbeck, University of London\nAlumni of the University of Cambridge\nBlack British women writers\nLiving people\n1975 births"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination."
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
As time went on why did they continue to resist?
| 2 |
As time went on why did the Naga people continue to resist?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Resist is the thirteenth studio album by Australian band Midnight Oil, released on 18 February 2022 by Sony Music Australia. The album will be supported by the band's final Australian and New Zealand tour, concluding in May 2022 with guitarist Jim Moginie saying \"We've played intensely physical gigs since our humble beginnings back in 1977 and we never want to take even the slightest risk of compromising that.\"\n\nBackground \nIn 2017, Midnight Oil returned from a long hiatus, toured Australia and Europe before returning to the studio for the first time in over 18 years and recorded 20 new songs. The first collection of that material formed The Makarrata Project, which debuted at number one on the ARIA Chart on the same weekend that long-time bass player Bones Hillman died.\n\nOn 26 November 2021, Midnight Oil announced the release of their 13th but not final studio album, Resist featuring the other 12 new songs they recorded with Hillman. The album became available for preorder from 30 November 2021 and is scheduled for release on 18 February 2022.\n\nOn 17 December 2021, the second single \"Tarkine\" was released. The song had already been debuted live on the 2019 tour.\n\nOn 4 February 2022, the album's third single \"At the Time of Writing\" was released.\n\nOn 18 February 2022, \"We Resist\" was send to radio as the album's fourth single.\n\nCritical reception\n\nJeff Jenkins from Stack said \"the Oils have never been a band to rest on their laurels, and that remains the case here. Put simply, Resist is a thrill from start to finish.\" concluding the review saying \"If Resist is the end of the road for Midnight Oil, it's one to treasure.\"\n\nJosh Leeson from The Newcastle Herald said \"Midnight Oil's farewell album Resist delivers everything Oils fans could have hoped for. It's direct and passionate, but the rage has been tempered by a sense of failure. Peter Garrett once sung 'The time has come/ To say fair's fair' but on Resist'''s opening track 'Rising Seas' he bemoans that his generation could have already failed the youth through inaction on climate change.\" Leeson adds \"Resist has certainly whet the appetite for Midnight Oil's farewell tour. They sign off as Australia's greatest political band, who still have something poignant to say. It's now up to the new generation to keep pushing that battering ram forward.\"The Australian said \"On a collection aptly named Resist'', the Sydney rock band retains its trademark urgency and instrumental dynamics laced with lyrical vitriol.\"\n\nTrack listing\n\nCharts\n\nReferences \n\n2022 albums\nMidnight Oil albums",
"Tyranny Of The Majority is the fourth and final album by the Industrial group Flesh Field. This album was written in a time period from mid-2006 to 2009. In January 2011, it was announced by Ian that he was disbanding Flesh Field as a musical project due to difficulties to collaborate with Wendy Yanko and difficulty to finding time to devote the attention to the project that it deserves. Ian went on to further say that he would continue to make music, and is considering making music under a new project.\n\nRelease\nIan has released seven of the instrumentals for Tyranny Of The Majority on the official Flesh Field website. Initially, these seven tracks were released as unmastered demos. Nathaniel of the Russian band Pheromone later decided to master the instrumental tracks. The only three tracks that weren't released on Flesh Field's official website were, \"Swarm\", \"Forgotten Trauma\", and \"In Perpetuity\". The reason why they were not released was because \"Swarm\" can be found on the album, \"Dependence: Next Level Electronics Volume 2\" and \"Forgotten Trauma\" can be found on the album \"Septic VI\". The status of \"In Perpetuity\" is currently unknown at this time.\n\nTrack listing\n\nAdditional Tracks\nIn addition to the seven instrumentals that were released as unfinished tracks, two untitled instrumentals were released as well that were cut from the album.\n\nPersonnel\nIan Ross - Music, Lyrics\nWendy Yanko - Vocals\nNathaniel - Mastering\nKonn Lavery - Artwork\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Flesh Field's Official Website\n\n2011 albums"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,"
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?
| 3 |
Did the Naga people end up being able to keep their land independent?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"A ved is a mythological being recorded in the region of Bilogora in northern Croatia, predominantly among the region's speakers of the Kajkavian dialect. The vedi (plural) were described as male human-like creatures as high as a peasant house, completely covered with hair. They were very strong, able to uproot trees and carry heavy loads, while their chest was so large that they could make storms by blowing. When they spoke or sang, it was heard far away. They lived deep in the forests of Bilogora, where they built their towns, and were divided into tribes.\n\nThere were good and bad vedi. The latter did not associate with people and stayed in their forests, because of which they were also called the forest vedi. They normally did no harm to people, but if a bad ved encountered a young man in a forest, he would take him to his town and keep him as a slave for some time. The man would be often maltreated by his master, and eventually set free emaciated.\n\nThe good vedi visited people and helped them in their every-day work or troubles. Each household had its own ved who was very devoted to it, often to the extent that he did harm to other households and their vedi. If people expected a flood, storm, or other calamity, they would pray, \"Grant, Oh God, that our vedi help us!\" or \"Dear God, grant that our vedi help us, and that their vedi do no harm to us!\" Stories have it that after such prayers the vedi would quickly come to rescue.\n\nLast accounts of vedi visiting people date from the mid 19th century. In the end only certain individuals were allegedly able to see them.\n\nReferences\n\nSlavic legendary creatures",
"The Wizard of Karres is a novel by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint, and Dave Freer that was published by Baen Books in 2004, as a sequel to The Witches of Karres by James H. Schmitz.\n\nThe book uses the same characters as the original novel, and starts about where the original ended. The story describes how Captain Pausert is found to have klatha (psionic) powers that increase over the course of the story, where he is called a witch, a \"hot witch\", and finally a wizard.\n\nPlot summary\nAfter safely arriving at the planet Emris at the end of the previous story, Captain Pausert is asked to transport the Nartheby sprite Hantis on an important mission so that she can meet with the Empress. Accompanying him is Goth, the Leewit, Hulik do Eldel, and Vezzarn from the original story, along with Pul, Hantis' talking grik-dog. They quickly learn that several groups are after them, presumably attempting to learn the secret of their Sheewash drive, which they have used when they need to escape from a difficult situation.\n\nThey eventually learn that their mission is to prevent a plague of nanites from taking control of people. They are being hunted by the ISS (secret service) which is under the influence of the nanites, the remaining gang of Agandar the pirate who is after the drive, and Sedmon, the Daal of Uldune (a planet that caters to pirates and others who have covert needs) who is also after the drive. They land on Vaudevillia, a planet for carnivals, and join up with Petey, Byrum and Keep, \"The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.\" Eventually Agandar's lieutenant catches up with them, and is killed in a sword fight during a Shakespearian play. The Daal of Uldune arrives shortly later, reveals that he has been trying to help them, agrees to fund the carnival, and travels with them.\n\nAt one point, Pausert and his group (except Hulik) separate from the carnival and are taken back in time to meet one of Hantis' ancestors. The same nanite plague is happening in that time period, and Pausert is able to stop the plague from spreading. Upon returning to their own time, they are able to meet the empress and stop that plague as well. Pausert learns that the witches of Karres deliberately did not teach him how to use his klatha powers because he had the inherent ability to exceed their capabilities if allowed to learn on his own.\n\nNotes\n\nExternal links\n official site\n Baen web page for the book\n\nAmerican fantasy novels\n2004 American novels\nBaen Books books"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative"
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
How was this agreement received by the Naga people?
| 4 |
How was the June 1974 9-point agreement received by the Naga people?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"The insurgency in Nagaland, in northeastern India, is an ongoing conflict fought between the ethnic Nagas and the governments of India. Nagaland inhabited by the Nagas is located at the tri-junction border of India on the West and South, north and Myanmar on the East.\n\n\"National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang)\", which wants an independent \"greater Nagaland\" to also include territory now in Myanmar, based on ethnicity; and the \"Naga National Council (Adino)\".\n\nThe question of \"Naga Sovereignty\" was put to plebiscite on 16 May 1951. To defend themselves, the Naga after much deliberation formed the armed wing of NNC, came to be known as NSG (Naga Safe Guards) under Kaito Sukhai.\n\nHistory\n1946 saw the creation of the Naga National Council (NNC) under Phizo's leadership. The NNC leaders and the Governor of Assam, Sir Akbar Hydari, signed a Nine-Point Agreement which granted Nagas rights over their lands and legislative and executive powers. The judicial capacity of Naga courts were empowered and no law from the provincial or central legislatures could affect this agreement. Very significantly, the agreement included a clause demanding that the Nagas be brought into the same administrative unit at the earliest. However, one clause stipulated \n\nThe Governor of Assam as the agent of the Government of India will have a special responsibility for a period of ten years to ensure that due observance of this agreement to be extended for a further period, or a new agreement regarding the future of the Naga people to be arrived at.\n\nThe interpretation of this clause has been contested between the Nagas and the Indian Government. To Nagas this clause meant independence from India at the end of the ten-year period. To the India Government this clause meant making a new agreement after the ten-year period if the present agreement did not address Naga issues sufficiently. Phizo rejected the Nine-Point Agreement to who the agreement fell short of dealing with the issue of Naga sovereignty. The NNC under Phizo's leadership declared Naga independence on 14 August 1947 and with success propagated the idea of Naga sovereignty throughout the Naga tribes. A Naga plebiscite was organised on 16 May 1951. The Naga struggle remained peaceful in the 1940s and early 1950s.\n\nThe Naga insurgency, climaxing in 1956, was an armed ethnic conflict led by the Naga National Council (NNC) which aimed for the secession of Naga territories from India. The more radical sectors of NNC created the Federal Government of Nagaland (FGN) which also included an underground Naga Army.\n\nThe insurgency witnessed a new spark in 2021 once Fourteen innocent citizens of Nagaland while returning to their homes after a day long work from the coal mines were ambushed and brutally killed by the Indian Army Soldiers of the 21 Para Special Forces army unit. The killings led to wide ranging protests to hold the soldiers accountable and asked for repealing of the Armed Forces Special Power Act. The Act commonly known as AFSPA was enacted in the state in 1958 by central government of India which authorizes soldiers of the armed forces to shoot any suspected individual without formal orders from any superior civilian authority.\n\nRebel groups \nSeveral rebel groups have operated in Nagaland since the mid-twentieth century, including the following:\n Naga National Council: a political organisation active in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which became separatist under Angami Zapu Phizo.\n Naga National Council (Adino) – NNC (Adino): the oldest political Naga organisation, now led by the daughter of Naga rebel A.Z. Phizo.\n National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah): formed on 31 January 1980 by Isak Chishi Swu, Thuingaleng Muivah and S. S. Khaplang ADAMANT. They want to establish a ‘Greater Nagaland’ (‘Nagalim’ or the People’s Republic of Nagaland) based on Mao Tse Tung’s model.\n National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang): formed on 30 April 1988, its goal is to establish a ‘greater Nagaland’ based on ethnicity, comprising the Naga-dominated areas within India, and contiguous areas in Myanmar.\n Naga Federal Government: separatist movement active in Nagaland during the 1970s. After its leader was captured and the headquarters destroyed, NFG's activities decreased.\n Naga Federal Army: separatist guerrilla organisation active in the 1970s. Several hundred members of NFA reportedly have received training in China.\n\nSee also\n Nagaland Peace Accord\n List of massacres in Nagaland\n Asymmetric warfare\n National Liberation Front of Tripura\n People's war\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Baptist Agenda for Peace in Nagalim, India\n\"A remote land of jungle, Jesus – and religious war\", Daily Herald, 5 May 2003\n \"Peace talks an insult to Nagas\", The Week, 9 February 2003.\n \"Religious Fervor May Dominate Emerging Indian State of Nagalim\", The Washington Diplomat, October 2003\n \"The most Baptist state in the world—Nagaland—is vying to become a powerhouse for cross-cultural missions\", Christianity Today, 20 February.\n\"We want t penetrate China, Cambodia, Burma, Vietnam and Laos and Nepal with the Gospel\", Christian Today (India), 29 August 2003.\n \"Nagas want solution, not election\", Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, February 1998\n \"Church Backs Terrorism in the North-East\", Ind Pride\n \"Role of the Church – Charity or...?\", Vanvasi Kalyan Parishad\n\"Nagaland 1954\", On War\n\nRebellions in India\n20th-century conflicts\n21st-century conflicts\nHistory of Nagaland\nNagaland\nOngoing insurgencies\nInsurgencies in Asia",
"The Shillong Accord of 1975 was an agreement signed between the Government of India, also referred to as the Federal government, or Union government, or Central government of India, and Nagaland's underground government, also referred to as the Naga Federal government, or Naga guerillas, or Naga rebels, to accept the supremacy of Constitution of India without condition, surrender their arms and renounce their demand for the secession of Nagaland from India.\n\nThis historic agreement was signed at Shillong, Meghalaya, on 11 November 1975; thus, the name Shillong Accord of 1975.\n\nRepresentatives\n The Indian government was represented by Lallan Prasad Singh, Governor of Nagaland. The governor was assisted by M L Kampani , Joint secretary in the Ministry of Home Affairs(MHA), and by two advisors for Nagaland—M. Ramunny and H. Zopianga.\n The Nagaland's underground organisations were represented by leaders including I. Temjenba, S. Dahru, Veenyiyl Rhakho, Z. Ramyo, M. Assa, and Kevi Yalie—younger brother of Angami Zapu Phizo, who was then-President of the Naga National Council (NNC) and was in exile in London from 1956 till his death.\n The Liaison committee of Nagaland Peace Council (NPC) were represented by five church leaders like Longri Ao, M. Aram, L. Lungalang, Kenneth Kerhuo, and Lungshim Shaiza.\n\nDiscussions\nThere were a series of four discussions held with governor alone; at times, assisted by his advisors and Joint secretary of MHA. In all the four discussions held on 10 and 11 November 1975, the representatives from underground government and liaison committee participated.\n\nAgreement details\nThe outcome of the discussions were compiled into three-point agreement, that ultimately came to be known as historic \"Shillong Accord of 1975.\"\n\n The representatives of the underground organisations conveyed their decision, of their own volition, to accept, without condition, the Constitution of India.\n It was agreed that the arms, now underground, would be brought out and deposited at appointed places. Details for giving effect of this agreement will be worked out between them and representatives of the Government, the security forces, and members of the Liaison Committee.\n It was agreed that the representatives of the underground organisations should have reasonable time to formulate other issues for discussion for final settlement.\n\nSignatory details\nThe \"Shillong Accord\" was signed on 11 November 1975 at Shillong, by the Governor of Nagaland L.P. Singh representing Indian government and the Nagaland's underground leadership represented by Kevi Yalie, M. Assa, S. Dahru, Veenyiyl Rhakho, and Z. Ramyo.\n\nSupplementary Agreement\nA supplementary agreement, detailing the process of depositing arms as per Clause 2 of Shillong Accord of 1975, was signed on 5 January 1976. The agreement included the implementation process of Clause 2, including the modalities for housing the underground members in peace camps.\n\n It was decided that the collection of arms, initially at collection centres, would commence as early as possible, and will be completed by 25 January 1976. Initial places of collection to be decided through discussion between Commissioner, representatives of underground organisations and the members of the Liaison Committee.\n Once all arms are collected, these will be handed over to Peace Council team at the respective places of collection.\n Peace Council team will arrange to transport the arms from collection centres to Chedema peace camp and arrange guards, etc., for safe custody of arms.\n Similar arrangement at agreed place/places will be made in Manipur with the concurrence of the Manipur Government.\n The underground may stay at peace camps to be established at suitable places, and their maintenance will be arranged only by the Peace Council. Any voluntary contribution from any source will be made to the Peace Council who will utilize the fund according to necessity.\n\nSignatory details\nThe \"Supplementary Agreement\" was signed on 5 January 1976 at Shillong, by the Governor of Nagaland L.P. Singh representing Indian government and the Nagaland's underground leadership represented by Biseto Medom Keyho, Pukrove Nakhro, I. Temjenba, and Z. Ramyo.\n\nPost-agreement consequences\nThe signing of Shillong Accord appears to have provided the final solution for the last twenty-years of conflict that inflicted suffering and neglect; accordingly, a large-scale of arms were surrendered, and the villagers enthusiastically participated in persuading the Naga underground rebels to come out and join the mainstream. The agreement also seems to be a victory for Indian government as Naga rebels agreed to accept the Indian constitution of their own volition, agreed to deposit the arms, and formulate other issues for discussions as part of final settlement.\n\nCriticism\nThe detractors and critics of the Shillong Accord maintained that the Clause 3 that stated \"reasonable time for the underground representatives to formulate other issues for discussion for the final settlement,\" still remained unimplemented -- as most of the Naga people and the Naga National Council(NNC) leaders abroad didn't agree to endorse the agreement. They even criticized saying that the agreement was signed by \"representatives of the Naga underground,\" rather than the organizations like NNC or the Federal Government of Nagaland(FGN).\n\nHowever, many Nagas, who were not reconciled being part of Indian union of states, condemned the agreement that ultimately created factionalism among the rebels. When the negotiations were going on before signing the agreement, it is said that Isak Chishi Swu, then-NNC Vice-president, and Thuingaleng Muivah, then-NNC General secretary, with 150 rebels were on their way back from China and Burma-Naga territory where they established their base. Some critics also point out that Phizo, then-NNC president and who was in exile from 1956 in London, neither endorsed nor renounced the agreement; though, his younger brother Kevi Yalley represented underground organizations and signed Shillong Accord. It is also believed that both Isak and Muivah tried their best to convince some of their colleagues, especially Phizo to condemn the agreement, including sending a seven-member delegation urging Phizo to condemn the Shillong Accord without delay; however, it looks Phizo remained silent and their voice went unheard.\n\nBoth Isak and Muivah after five years of signing the accord, decided to restore the damaged image of the NNC for having accepted the Indian constitution, openly rejected the agreement terming it as a \"betrayal\" by the NNC and censured it as a complete \"sell-out\" of the Naga rights, including derogatory remarks against Phizo, and swore to fight for unquestionable sovereignty; thus, the trio Muivah, Isaac and S. Khaplang created National Socialist Council of Nagaland(NSCN) breaking-up[abandoning] from their old organization NNC on 2 February 1980. NSCN, in spite of emerging as a strong rebel group, never enjoyed the popular support that NNC enjoyed at its peak. By 1988, NSCN was further splintered on tribal lines into two different factions—NSCN(K), under Khaplang leadership, and NSCN(IM), under Isak and Muivah leadership. After the death of Phizo on 30 April 1990 in London, NNC further splintered into two more factions—NNC(A), under Phizo's daughter Adino leadership, and NNC(K), led by previous NNC Vice-president Khodao Yanthan.\n\nSee also\n Naga people#Statehood, factions and ceasefires\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nFull Text of Shillong Accord\nText of all peace accords for India\n Nagaland: The Beginning of Insurgency - II : The Shillong Accord\n HISTORY : SHILLONG ACCORD\n Going round the mulberry bush\n Insurgency in India's Northeast Cross-border Links and Strategic Alliances - Wasbir Hussain\n NNC condemns Shillong Accord\n The Unceasing Oozing Nagas Blood and Tears \n Governing through Peace Accords – A Democratic Inquiry\n Tussle for Phek foothold\t\n How can we help to speed up the Indo-Naga Peace Process\n ‘We’re not part of India, so we can’t be called secessionists’\n Insurgency in the North East\n\n1975 in India\nHistory of Nagaland\n1970s in Nagaland\nTreaties concluded in 1975\nTreaties of India"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it."
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
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Did they eventually accept the new agreement?
| 5 |
Did the Naga people eventually accept the new administrative agreement?
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Naga people
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The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
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Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,
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Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Kean v Dunfoy [1952] NZLR 611 is a cited New Zealand case regarding implied time limits to accept an offer, otherwise the offer lapses. In this case, it was held that a period of 12 months in accepting an offer was too long.\n\nBackground\nDunfoy purchased a section from Kean, and Dunfoy accepted the sale terms in September 1950. However, after paying the deposit, Dunfoy did not communicate his acceptance of Kean's offer until 12 months later in September 1951. Kean refused to settle, and instead resold the section to another party. Dunfoy sought specific performance under the initial sales agreement or damages.\n\nHeld\nThe Court held that to accept an offer, a party must communicate their acceptance of the offer within a reasonable period of time. Here it was held that a period of 12 months was not a reasonable period of time to let lapse.\n\nHigh Court of New Zealand cases\nNew Zealand contract case law\n1952 in New Zealand law\n1952 in case law",
"Redbox Automated Retail LLC v. Universal City Studios LLLP, Dist. Court, D. Delaware 2009 was a case before Robert B. Kugler concerning copyright misuse, antitrust, and tortious interference with contract.\n\nRedbox rents and sells DVDs through automated retail kiosks, and Universal Studios is a major movie studio. Redbox sued Universal on counts of copyright misuse, antitrust, and tortious interference with contract when Universal pressured Redbox to accept an agreement to only obtain titles from them after 45 days of initial DVD release. Universal pressured Redbox's distributors to stop providing titles to Redbox if Redbox did not accept this agreement. Universal did this to protect their profits, but since Redbox makes a majority of their profits within two weeks of DVD release, Redbox did not accept.\n\nThe court dismissed Redbox's copyright misuse and tortious interference with contract claims but allowed the antitrust count to move forward.\n\nBackground\nRedbox is a company that rents and sells DVDs through over 35,900 automated retail kiosks inside chain restaurants, grocery stores, and drug stores in American cities. Universal Studios is a major movie studio that produces many of the titles that Redbox rents. Universal was concerned that DVD kiosks jeopardize their profits from DVD sales and rentals, so they pressured VPD and Ingram, two of Redbox's major film distributors, to stop distributing to Redbox unless Redbox signs a Revenue Sharing Agreement to only obtain DVDs directly from Universal and only after 45 days of initial DVD release. Since new release DVDs generate 30% of the total revenue for that particular title in Redbox's kiosks, Redbox did not sign the agreement as it would damage their profits.\n\nAs a result, Redbox claimed that they could no longer obtain titles through VPD and Ingram. They also claim that they could not obtain these titles through Walmart and Best Buy stores because the stores would either impose a limit on how many DVDs can be purchased at a time, or not sell to Redbox personnel entirely.\n\nLegal action history\nIn October 2008, two months after the Revenue Sharing Agreement was proposed, Redbox began to raise claims against Universal Studios. In response, Universal motioned to dismiss some complaints. Redbox amended their previous complaint, added and omitted facts, and added more claims against Universal. Universal motioned in favor of their previous motion. The Court ordered mediation, but mediation fails. Eventually, the Amended Complaint sounded in six counts: (1) copyright misuse; (2) antitrust violations under the Quick Look Doctrine; (3) antitrust violations under the Rule of Reason doctrine; (4) antitrust violations amounting to restraint of trade; (5) antitrust violations under Section 1 of the Sherman Act; and (6) tortious interference with contract.\n\nOpinion of the Court\n\nCopyright misuse\nRedbox asserts that Universal staged a boycott of sales of Universal DVDs to Redbox, which violates the first sale doctrine of Section 109(a) of the Copyright Act. The Court dismissed this assertion, because the claim of copyright misuse is unavailable to Redbox and is impertinent to the dispute. The Court claimed that copyright misuse is a defense and not a claim, so Redbox cannot raise such a claim.\n\nAntitrust\nThe Court ruled that Redbox sufficiently pleaded Universal violated Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Court stated that Universal had convinced others to boycott Redbox in distribution of Universal DVDs, which damaged Redbox's ability to compete in the DVD rental and sales market. The Court was convinced that Universal's actions were anti-competitive in nature, and thus violated the Sherman Antitrust Act.\n\nTortious interference with contract\nThe Court dismissed Redbox's claim that Universal tortiously interfered with Redbox's contracts with DVD distributors VPD and Ingram. This is because the contracts between Redbox and its suppliers did not explicitly state that the suppliers must provide Universal DVDs to Redbox. The contracts merely obligate Ingram to \"order DVD software from the studios at the pricing negotiated by Redbox\". Furthermore, Universal's contract with the distributors stated that \"Distributor shall not sell to any account other than a retail account as verified by Universal.\" Therefore, restricting the distributor's sale of Universal DVDs was in Universal's right.\n\nSubsequent developments\nOn March 1, 2012, Redbox announced that it had agreed on a deal with Universal to offer DVDs 28 days after its initial release. This deal is good through August 2014.\n\nRedbox has had similar lawsuits and resolutions with other major film studios. Multimillion-dollar deals were signed with some studios that allowed Redbox to rent new release DVDs without delay, while deals with other studios have yet to be settled.\n\nSee also\nFirst-sale doctrine\nSherman Antitrust Act\nTortious interference\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Redbox\n Universal Studios\n\nUnited States District Court for the District of Delaware cases\nUniversal Pictures litigation\nUnited States copyright case law\nCoinstar\nUnited States lawsuits\n2009 in United States case law\nUnited States antitrust case law\nUnited States tort case law"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.",
"Did they eventually accept the new agreement?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,"
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
Have they been able to keep their independence to this day?
| 6 |
Have the Naga been able to keep their independence from the British after 1947?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India,
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"North Borneo Self-government Day is a self-government day celebrated on 31 August every year by the state of Sabah in Malaysia. Since 2012, the holiday has been received widely by the Sabah state government and the citizens of Sabah, as the Hari Merdeka was not the right celebration day for the state.\n\nWhile North Borneo Self-government Day is often referred to as 'Independence Day', this is strictly speaking incorrect, since British legislation on North Borneo's self-government did not provide for its independence prior to it joining to form the federation of Malaysia. In 2018, the Borneo Heritage Foundation (BHF) has called the state government to gazette the day as \"Sabah Day\" and declare it as a state holiday.\n\nSabah Day will be celebrated for the first time since 1963 by 2022 and beyond, after the state government approved the proposal to gazette 31 August as \"Sabah Day\" in 2021. This will replacing the current Hari Merdeka that been celebrated widely in Sabah for a long time.\n\nBackground \nAfter the end of the World War II, the territory was administered by the British Military Administration which later transferred to the Crown Colony government in 1946 as the British North Borneo Chartered Company facing a difficulties due to the high cost to reconstructing North Borneo. The task to reconstructing the territory was later taken by the Crown colony government with the first Crown Colony Governor appointed was Edward Twining on 5 May 1949. Ralph Hone succeeded him to continue the reconstruction of the territory and later Roland Turnbull until the last Crown Colony governor of William Goode. After all the reconstruction projects been completed, the Crown Colony government later decided to grant a self-government to the territory on 31 August 1963, which is 16 days before the establishment of the Federation of Malaysia on 16 September 1963.\n\nRelationship with Hari Merdeka \nNorth Borneo Self-government Day, 31 August, also happens to be Hari Merdeka (Independence Day), a national day of Malaysia commemorating the independence of the Federation of Malaya from British colonial rule in 1957. The Borneo Heritage Foundation and Sabah DAP have stated that they will be celebrating 'Sabah Independence Day' instead of Hari Merdeka on that day.\n\nStarting from 2015, as was stated by the Minister of Communication and Multimedia Ahmad Shabery Cheek, the Independence Day celebration is likely to be held without mentioning the number of years to prevent the people in Sabah and Sarawak from being isolated if the number of independence anniversaries was stated. However, the Minister of Land Development of Sarawak Tan Sri Datuk Amar Dr James Masing reminded that since 16 September had been declared as Malaysia Day, it should be the rallying point for the nation's unity. He added \"Everyone now knows that 31 August is Malaya's and Sabah's Independence Day… it's not our (Sarawak) independence day. They can celebrate it both in Malaya and in Sabah as they have the same Independence Day date, and we can join them there if they invite us. We must right the wrong\". Masing was commenting on Shabery Cheek’s recent proposal that Malaysia should continue to commemorate 31 August as its Independence Day, without mentioning the anniversary year.\n\nSee also \n Merdeka Day\n Sarawak Day\n Malaysia Day\n\nReferences \n\nHistory of North Borneo\nHistory of Sabah\nPublic holidays in Malaysia\nSabah\nAugust observances",
"The Bankruptcy Act of 1800 was the first piece of federal legislation in the United States surrounding bankruptcy. The act was passed in response to a decade of periodic financial crises and commercial failures. It was modeled after English practice. The act placed the bankrupt estate under the control of a commissioner chosen by the district judge. The debt would be forgiven if two-thirds of creditors (by both number and dollar amount) agreed to forgive the remaining debt. Only merchants could petition a creditor to file a case under the provisions of the act. \n\nBefore independence, bankruptcy law in the Thirteen Colonies followed English common law. After multiple wars, including the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War, debt became more common not only at a national level but also in personal affairs. With this change came a shift in perspective surrounding debt. Instead of viewing it as a moral flaw, as English policy did, it became known as bad luck or a result of unfortunate events. By setting up a separate system for debtors and creditors, the United States attempted to curb the number of bankrupt citizens being put in jail. The act was meant as a temporary measure with a five-year sunset clause. Congress repealed the act in 1803.\n\nEnglish policy in the Thirteen Colonies\nPrior to independence, policies concerning bankruptcy in the Thirteen Colonies followed English common law. In the late eighteenth century, bankruptcy was seen as a moral failure in England. People were expected to keep their affairs in order and any deviance from upright economic standing was considered a personal fault. Individuals who were unable to pay back their debts had their property confiscated and assigned to the creditor, or were imprisoned.\n\nUnited States policy before the act\nIn the years following American independence, the nation accrued significant debt as a result of the Seven Years' War and the American Revolutionary War. The national debt destabilized the economy and resulted in higher debts for private citizens. As debt became more common, the nation did not abandon English practice, though it was often modified in the arrangements between debtors and creditors.\n\nPolicy changes\nThe act provided for creditors to file bankruptcy against those who could not pay their debts. Once filed, bankruptcy cases were sent to district judges who would pick specific administrators separate from themselves to look over the cases and help facilitate the payments and legal ramifications. The debt would be forgiven if two-thirds of the creditors, in both number and amount owed, agreed to forgive the remaining debt. This system was intended to help individuals manage their debt and have a middle man to keep creditors from hastily throwing their debtors in jail. This system was not available to all people; during the three years that this act was used, only merchants were eligible to have creditors forgive their debt in this fashion.\n\nRepeal of the act\nMany of the commissioners appointed to oversee the bankruptcies did not keep track of all the information. When President James Monroe asked for a report on how this act had played out, many reported that they had either not kept their paperwork in order or did not have any to begin with. This allowed for a large amount of dishonesty and fraud. Administrators were able to pocket money or use it for other purposes with very little judicial oversight. Many debtors were not able to be released from their creditors even after their cases had been filed. In addition, many bankrupt individuals hid different assets that they owned to keep them from being taken or used to pay back the money that they owed. Those who were not eligible had no chance to work off the money, and even those who were eligible had to hope that their creditor would file the case and be willing to forgive the debt. In totality, many people were further thrust into debt, and the act did not serve the purpose of lowering economic failure for the nation. As a result, Congress repealed the act in 1803, two years before it expired.\n\nSee also\n History of bankruptcy law in the United States\n Bankruptcy in the United States\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nOriginal text of the bill from the Library of Congress.\n\nUnited States bankruptcy legislation\n1800 in American law\nHistory of bankruptcy law\nUnited States repealed legislation"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.",
"Did they eventually accept the new agreement?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,",
"Have they been able to keep their independence to this day?",
"In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India,"
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
Why do they struggle for identity?
| 7 |
Why do the Naga people struggle for identity?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Why Me & Sherry's House is a non-profit organization established in 1985, in the suburbs of Worcester, Massachusetts. The home provides an environment for children who battle childhood cancer with the support of others encountering similar circumstances with the illness.\n\nHistory\nWhy Me\nWorcester Help for Youth, Memories Everlasting\nThe Why Me Organization was developed by Sherry Shepherd a thirteen-year-old cancer patient. Sherry was the first patient in the opening of the oncology department at the University Of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Sherry wanted to leave her legacy to the community and help other cancer patients through their struggle and challenges of the disease. Why Me, stands for Worcester Help for Youth, Memories Everlasting.\n\nSherry’s House\nSherry's House is an addition to the Why Me Organization. Sherry's House provides a place for children and their families to receive compassion, encouragement and support throughout the battle of their illness of childhood cancer. Sherry's House serves as the home base and services over 500 families from all over the New England area. Summer Camp, monthly support group meetings, Easter Egg Hunt, and more are held at Sherry's House for all Why Me families. Sherry's House is also an eight bedroom residence for families to reside while on active treatment. It is cost free to stay there.\n\nBen's Activity Center\nBen's Activity Center is a wing added to Sherry's House in honor of five-year-old Ben Hagan. The 3,200 square foot area provides a three level living area for children and their families, consisting of a Main floor, Bedroom floor, and a Basement. The Main floor provides a clubhouse environment for children to play, do activities, arts and crafts, and a large toy room. The Basement is a play area consisting of air hockey and pool tables and video games. The top floor is a hospice suite for end of life care or for families after a transplant. Within the suite is two bedrooms, full kitchen, laundry, and sitting room.\n\nExternal links \n http://www.whyme.org/sherrys-house.php\n\nOrganizations based in Worcester, Massachusetts\nNon-profit organizations based in Massachusetts",
"Robert Lane Greene is an American journalist, best known for his work for The Economist and his book about the politics of language, You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity, published by Delacorte Press in 2011. Publishers Weekly described the book as \"drawing from such sources such as the Tower of Babel, the Balkan Wars and the Ebonics controversy, to explain how the claims people make about 'their' specific language are really about identity politics.\" He has written a regular column for The New Republic website. He has also written for The New York Times, Slate and a number of other publications. \nGreene was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and grew up in Marietta, Georgia. He received a bachelor's degree from Tulane University in 1997 and earned a master's in European Politics in 1999 while attending Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship.\n\nIn 2017, Greene received the Journalism Award of the Linguistic Society of America.\n\nIn 2018, he published the book Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't Be Tamed (author: Lane Greene, without 'Robert'; title also: Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Won't Do As It's Told).\n\nReferences \n\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nWriters from Atlanta\nTulane University alumni\nAlumni of St Antony's College, Oxford\nAmerican male journalists\nMarshall Scholars\nJournalists from New York City\nLinguistics Journalism Award recipients"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.",
"Did they eventually accept the new agreement?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,",
"Have they been able to keep their independence to this day?",
"In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India,",
"Why do they struggle for identity?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
What else can you tell me of significance?
| 8 |
What else can you tell me of significance about the Naga people, besides the NNC claiming that 99 percent of the tribal people supported a referendum to seced from India?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India.
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"\"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",
"\"Tell Me What You Want\" is the fourth single by English R&B band Loose Ends from their first studio album, A Little Spice, and was released in February 1984 by Virgin Records. The single reached number 74 in the UK Singles Chart.\n\nTrack listing\n7” Single: VS658\n \"Tell Me What You Want) 3.35\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Dub Mix)\" 3.34\n\n12” Single: VS658-12\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Extended Version)\" 6.11\n \"Tell Me What You Want (Extended Dub Mix)\" 5.41\n\nU.S. only release - 12” Single: MCA23596 (released 1985)\n \"Tell Me What You Want (U.S. Extended Remix)\" 6.08 *\n \"Tell Me What You Want (U.S. Dub Version)\" 5.18\n\n* The U.S. Extended Remix version was released on CD on the U.S. Version of the 'A Little Spice' album (MCAD27141).\n\nThe Extended Version also featured on Side D of the limited gatefold sleeve version of 'Magic Touch'\n\nChart performance\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Tell Me What You Want at Discogs.\n\n1984 singles\nLoose Ends (band) songs\nSong recordings produced by Nick Martinelli\nSongs written by Carl McIntosh (musician)\nSongs written by Steve Nichol\n1984 songs\nVirgin Records singles"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.",
"Did they eventually accept the new agreement?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,",
"Have they been able to keep their independence to this day?",
"In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India,",
"Why do they struggle for identity?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me of significance?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India."
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
So do they have their own country per say?
| 9 |
So do the Naga people have their own country per say?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
India responded by crushing it with their armed forces.
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Emma Sophia Galton (1811–1904) was the author of an 1863 book entitled a Guide to the Unprotected in Every-Day Matters Relating to Property and Income, which was published anonymously by Macmillan and credited to \"A Banker's Daughter\".\n\nBiography\nGalton (1811–1904) was the fourth child of Samuel Tertius Galton and an elder sister of the eminent Victorian scientist Francis Galton.\n\nIn writing her financial guide, Galton noted that: \"Many young people, and especially widows and single ladies, when they first possess money of their own, are in want of advice when they have commonplace business matters to transact. […] My aim throughout is to avoid all technicalities; to give plain and practical directions, not only as to what ought to be done, but how to do it.\" She went on to advise: \"When an inexperienced person comes into possession of her fortune, and especially if it be a small one, her first inquiry is, 'How can I invest my money so as to get the highest possible interest?' Let her rather seek to place it where her Capital will be safest. The Duke of Wellington used to say, 'High interest is another name for bad security.' In this country 4½ per cent is generally the highest safe Interest you can receive: 4 per cent, more usually so. When 6, 7, 8, or more per cent, is offered by Banks, Mortgages, Loans, or Mines, beware of accepting it, as the probability is that you will lose both your Principal and Interest, as so many have done. Such an Interest can seldom be given consistently with safety.\"\n\nGalton's doubts concerning her brother Francis' theory of eugenics, a term he created, prompted him to write to her in defence of it telling her, \"It is one of the few services that a man situated like myself can do, to take up an unpopular side when he knows it to be the true one\". A copy of the correspondence between her and her brother is retained by the Wellcome Library.\n\nLegacy\nThe Victorian Women Writer's Project, hosted by Indiana University, has made a full transcription of the second edition of Galton's book (1864) available.\n\nGalton's advice was reappraised in December 2016 by BBC Radio 4's personal finance radio programme Money Box, which reported that, \"The book was probably the first general guide to finance, and certainly the first aimed at women who, like Emma herself, had found themselves with money of their own\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nText of the 1864 (2nd edition) of Galton's book\n\n1811 births\n1904 deaths\n19th-century English writers\nFinance and investment writers\nPeople from Birmingham, West Midlands",
"Amarna letter EA 38, titled A Brotherly Quarrel, is a letter from the King of Alashiya (modern Cyprus). One identifier of many of the Amarna letters, is the use of paragraphing. Six paragraphs are in this letter, with much of the letter's reverse – uninscribed.\n\nThe Amarna letters, about 300, numbered up to EA 382, are a mid 14th century BC, about 1350 BC and 20–25 years later, correspondence. The initial corpus of letters were found at Akhenaten's city Akhetaten, in the floor of the Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh; others were later found, adding to the body of letters.\n\nThe letter\n\nEA 38: A Brotherly Quarrel\nEA 38, letter number five of seven, from Alashiya. (Not a linear, line-by-line translation.)\n\nObverse\n\n(Lines 1-6)–Say to the king of Egypt-(Mizri), my brother: Message of the king of Alashiya, your brother. For me all goes well, and for you may all go well. For your household, your chief wives,1 your sons, your horses, your chariots, among your numerous troops, in your country, among your magnates, may all go very well.\n\n(7-12)–Why, my brother, do you say such a thing to me, \"Does my brother not know this?\" As far as I am concerned, I have done nothing of the sort. Indeed,2 men of Lukki, year by year, seize villages in my own country.\n\n(13-18)–My brother, you say to me, \"Men from your country were with them.\" My brother, I myself do not know that they were with them. If men from my country were (with them), send (them back) and I will act as I see fit.\n\n(19-22)–You yourself do not know men from my country. They would not do such a thing.3 But if men from my country did do this, then you yourself do as you see fit.\n\n(23-26)–Now, my brother, since you have not sent back my messenger, for this tablet it is the king's brother (as messenger). L[et] him write. Your messengers must tell me what I am to do.4\n\nbottom\n(26)–\"to do\"4\nReverse\n\n(lines: 27-30)–Furthermore, which ancestors of yours did such a thin{g} to my ancestors: So no, my brother, do not be concerned. –(complete EA 38, with virtually no lacunae, lines 1-30)\n\nSee also\nAmarna letters–phrases and quotations\nList of Amarna letters by size\nAmarna letter EA 5, EA 9, EA 15, EA 19, EA 26, EA 27, EA 35, EA 38 \nEA 153, EA 161, EA 288, EA 364, EA 365, EA 367\n\nExternal links\nLine drawing of EA 38, Obverse & Reverse\nLine Drawing, cuneiform, and Akkadian, EA 205: Obverse & Reverse, CDLI no. P271039 (Chicago Digital Library Initiative)\nCDLI listing of all EA Amarna letters, 1-382\n\nReferences\n\nMoran, William L. The Amarna Letters. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987, 1992. (softcover, )\n\nAmarna letter EA 00038\nAlashiya (Cypress) Amarna letters\nKingdoms (Great Kings), countries, & regions Amarna letters"
] |
[
"Naga people",
"Resistance and struggle for identity",
"Why did they resist?",
"initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination.",
"As time went on why did they continue to resist?",
"On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state,",
"Did they end up being able to keep their land independent?",
"In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative",
"How was this agreement received by the Naga people?",
"Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it.",
"Did they eventually accept the new agreement?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947,",
"Have they been able to keep their independence to this day?",
"In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India,",
"Why do they struggle for identity?",
"I don't know.",
"What else can you tell me of significance?",
"Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India.",
"So do they have their own country per say?",
"India responded by crushing it with their armed forces."
] |
C_affce1bedd63458da252102829d6e1f8_0
|
So they live on land inside of India?
| 10 |
So the Naga people live on land inside of India?
|
Naga people
|
The Naga hills have been an area of continued resistance as they had long been isolated from outside cultures. The development of a spirit of nationalism and sense of a common identity are relatively new concepts among the Naga people. According to their traditions, each village is an independent republic; initially, they wanted to be free from all outside domination. Modern education, together with Christian missions, contributed to the politicization of Naga ethnicity. In 1918, a group of educated Nagas formed Naga Club in 1918. The club wrote to the Simon Commission in 1929 demanding that "Nagas should not be included within the Reformed Scheme of India". On 14 August 1947, the day before India gained independence from British rule, the Nagas were the first ethnic group from the northeast to declare their territory an independent state, not belonging to the new nation. Angami Zapu Phizo led the initial movement with the Naga National Council (NNC). In the last days of the British Raj, he held talks trying to achieve a sovereign Naga nation. In June 1947, a 9-point agreement was signed which promised to bring the Naga tribes under a single political administrative unit and recognised the Nagas' right to self-determination after 10 years. Disputes arose over the interpretation of the agreement, and many in the NNC opposed it. Under Phizo, the NNC declared their independence from the British on 14 August 1947, a day before India. In May 1951, the NNC claimed that 99 per cent of the tribal people supported a referendum to secede from India, which was summarily rejected by the government in New Delhi. By 1952, the NNC, composed primarily of Nagaland Nagas, led a guerrilla movement. India responded by crushing it with their armed forces. Phizo escaped from the region through East Pakistan and went into exile to London. He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990. CANNOTANSWER
|
He continued to inspire the independence movement from there till his death in 1990.
|
Nagas are various ethnic groups native to northeastern India and northwestern Myanmar. The groups have similar cultures and traditions, and form the majority of population in the Indian state of Nagaland and Naga Self-Administered Zone of Myanmar; with significant populations in Manipur, and Assam in India; Sagaing Region and Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma).
The Nagas are divided into various Naga ethnic groups whose numbers and population are unclear. They each speak distinct Naga languages often unintelligible to the others.
Etymology
The present day Naga people have been called by many names, like 'Noga' by Assamese 'chingmi' by Manipuri and 'Chin' by Burmese. However, over time 'Naga' became the commonly accepted nomenclature, and was also used by the British. According to the Burma Gazetteer, the term 'Naga' is of doubtful origin and is used to describe hill tribes that occupy the country between the Chin in the south and Kachin (Singpho) in the Northeast.
Languages
The Naga languages are either classified under the Kuki-Chin-Naga languages or the Sal languages.
Nagas have more language diversity than any other ethnic group or states in India. Naga people speak over 89 different languages and dialects, mostly unintelligible with each other. However, there are many similarities in between different languages spoken by them.
The diversity of languages and traditions of the Nagas results most likely from the multiple cultural absorptions that occurred during their successive migrations. According to legend, before settling in the region, these groups moved over vast zones, and in the process, some clans were absorbed into one or more other groups. Therefore, until recent times, absorptions were a source of many interclan conflicts.
In 1967, the Nagaland Assembly proclaimed English as the official language of Nagaland and it is the medium for education in Nagaland. Other than English, Nagamese, a creole language form of the Assamese language, is a widely spoken language. Every community has its own mother tongue but communicates with other communities in either Nagamese or English. However, English is the predominant spoken and written language in Nagaland. Hindi is also taught along with English in most schools and most Nagas prefer to used Hindi to communicate with the migrant workers of the state, that primarily comes from Bihar, UP and Madhya Pradesh.
Culture
Art
The Naga people love colour as is evident in the shawls designed and woven by women, and in the headgear that both sexes design. Clothing patterns are traditional to each group, and the cloths are woven by the women. They use beads in variety, profusion and complexity in their jewelry, along with a wide range of materials including glass, shell, stone, teeth or tusk, claws, horns, metal, bone, wood, seeds, hair, and fibre.
According to Dr. Verrier Elwin, these groups made all the goods they used, as was once common in many traditional societies: "they have made their own cloth, their own hats and rain-coats; they have prepared their own medicines, their own cooking-vessels, their own substitutes for crockery.". Craftwork includes the making of baskets, weaving of cloth, wood carving, pottery, metalwork, jewellery-making and bead-work.
Weaving of colorful woolen and cotton shawls is a central activity for women of all Nagas. One of the common features of Naga shawls is that three pieces are woven separately and stitched together. Weaving is an intricate and time consuming work and each shawl takes at least a few days to complete. Designs for shawls and wraparound garments (commonly called mekhala) are different for men and women. Among many groups the design of the shawl denotes the social status of the wearer. Some of the more known shawls include Tsungkotepsu and Rongsu of the Aos; Sutam, Ethasu, Longpensu of the Lothas; Supong of the Sangtams, Rongkhim and Tsungrem Khim of the Yimkhiungs; and the Angami Lohe shawls with thick embroidered animal motifs.
Naga jewelry is an equally important part of identity, with the entire tribe wearing similar bead jewelry.
The Indian Chamber of Commerce has filed an application seeking registration of traditional Naga shawls made in Nagaland with the Geographical Registry of India for Geographical Indication.
Cuisine
Naga cuisine is characterized by smoked and fermented foods.
Folk song and dances
Folk songs and dances are essential ingredients of the traditional Naga culture. The oral tradition is kept alive through the media of folk tales and songs. Naga folk songs are both romantic and historical, with songs narrating entire stories of famous ancestors and incidents. Seasonal songs describe activities done in a particular agricultural cycle. The early Western missionaries opposed the use of folk songs by Naga Christians as they were perceived to be associated with spirit worship, war, and immorality. As a result, translated versions of Western hymns were introduced, leading to the slow disappearance of indigenous music from the Naga hills.
Folk dances of the Nagas are mostly performed in groups in synchronized fashion, by both men and women, depending on the type of dance. Dances are usually performed at festivals and religious occasions. War dances are performed mostly by men and are athletic and martial in style. All dances are accompanied by songs and war cries by the dancers. Indigenous musical instruments made and used by the people are bamboo mouth organs, cup violins, bamboo flutes, trumpets, drums made of cattle skin, and log drums.
Festivals
The various Naga groups have their own distinct festivals. To promote inter-group interaction, the Government of Nagaland has organized the annual Hornbill Festival since 2000. Another inter-tribe festival is Lui Ngai Ni. The group-specific festivals include:
Naga identity
The word Naga originated as an exonym. Today, it covers a number of ethnic groups that reside in Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh states of India, and also in Myanmar.
Before the arrival of the British, the term "Naga" was used by Assamese to refer to certain isolated ethnic groups. The British adopted this term for a number of ethnic groups in the surrounding area, based on loose linguistic and cultural associations. The number of groups classified as "Naga" increased significantly in the 20th century: as of December 2015, 89 groups are classified as Naga by the various sources. This expansion in the "Naga" identity has been due to a number of factors including the quest for upward mobility in the society of Nagaland, and the desire to establish a common purpose of resistance against dominance by other groups. In this way, the "Naga" identity has not always been fixed.
The Kuki people of Nagaland have been classified as "Naga" in the past, but today are generally considered a non-Naga. The Kuki have had good relations with the Naga in the past, but since the 1990s, conflicts have risen, especially in Manipur.
Nagas in India
Several Naga tribes are listed as scheduled tribes in 6 Indian States: Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland
Nagas in Myanmar
Nagas in Myanmar are mostly found in Sagaing Division and Kachin state. The Naga territory in Myanmar is marked by Kabaw valley in the south bordering to the Chin state, the Kachin on the north and the Burmese on the east.
The Major Naga ethnic groups in Myanmar are:
Konyak
Lainong
Makury
Nokko (Khiamniungan)
Para
Somra Tangkhul
Tangshang
Anāl Naga
Some other minor Naga groups are Lamkang, Moyon, Koka, Longphuri, Paung Nyuan, etc
The townships which are inhabited by the Nagas are:
Homalin
Lahe with Tanbakwe sub-township
Layshi with Mowailut sub-township and Somra sub-township
Hkamti
Nanyun with Pangsau and Dunghi sub-township
Tamu of Sagaing Division and
Tanai of Kachin state
Anal and Moyon are mainly found in Tamu township on the south and a few Somra Nagas are also found in and around Tamu bordering to Layshi jurisdiction. Makury, Para and Somra tribes are mainly found in Layshi township. Makury Nagas and a few Somra Nagas are also found in Homalin township. Lahe is highly populated by Konyak, Nokko, Lainong and Makury tribes. Nanyun on the north is the home of Tangshang tribe which comprises more than 54 sub-dialect groups. Homlin township is highly populated by the considered lost tribes (Red Shans). But Kukis, Burmese, Chinese and Indians are also found there. Hkamti township is populated altogether by all the Naga tribes majority and with a number of Burmese, Shans, Chinese and Indians. Tanai in Kachin state of Myanmar is inhabited by the Tangshang Nagas among the Kachin people.
Gallery
See also
History of the Nagas
List of Naga tribes
List of Naga languages
List of Naga people
References
Further reading
Drouyer, A. Isabel, Drouyer René, " THE NAGAS: MEMORIES OF HEADHUNTERS- Indo-Burmese Borderlands vol.1"; White Lotus, 2016, .
Wettstein, Marion. 2014. Naga Textiles: Design, Technique, Meaning and Effect of a Local Craft Tradition in Northeast India. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
von Stockhausen, Alban. 2014. Imag(in)ing the Nagas: The Pictorial Ethnography of Hans-Eberhard Kauffmann and Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf. Arnoldsche, Stuttgart 2014, .
Shongzan, Mayaso, "A Portrait of the Tangkhul Nagas"; Exodus, 2013, .
Stirn, Aglaja & Peter van Ham. The Hidden world of the Naga: Living Traditions in Northeast India. London: Prestel.
Oppitz, Michael, Thomas Kaiser, Alban von Stockhausen & Marion Wettstein. 2008. Naga Identities: Changing Local Cultures in the Northeast of India. Gent: Snoeck Publishers.
Kunz, Richard & Vibha Joshi. 2008. Naga – A Forgotten Mountain Region Rediscovered. Basel: Merian.
Shimray, Atai, A.S. - "Let freedom ring?: Story of Naga nationalism".
Novels
Ben Doherty, Nagaland, Wild Dingo Press, Melbourne, 2018, .
External links
Official site of Nagaland state government
Photos of Nagas in Burma by Goto Osami
Photos of Nagas by Pablo Bartholomew
Article "Textile & Bead Art of Nagaland"
National Geographic Why These Headhunters Converted to Christianity
Naga National Council's Official site
Sino-Tibetan-speaking people
Ethnic groups in Northeast India
Indigenous peoples of South Asia
Social groups of Assam
Headhunting
Scheduled Tribes of Nagaland
Ethnic groups in South Asia
Ethnic groups divided by international borders
| false |
[
"Lloyd Rudolph and Susanne Rudolph, known together as the Rudolphs, are American academians who extensively researched on Indian history and democracy.\n\nLife \n\nThey were PhD students at Harvard University and came to India for research on democracy in 1956 under grant by Ford Foundation. They travelled by Land Rover jeep and finally stayed at Jaipur for research on history of Rajasthan, a western state in India. They initially lived at Tilaknagar in Jaipur and later moved to Narayan Niwas. Their children studied in India and can speak Hindi language too. One of their daughter get married in their Jaipur home. They stayed at Chennai for brief period. They together with Mohan Singh Kanota wrote Reversing The Gaze based on the 89 volumes of the Amar Singh diary which are now on display at Amar Singh Library and Museum in Kanota Castle near Jaipur. They spent five out of seven research years in India, 1956–57, 1971–72, 1975–76, 1979–80 and 1983-84 in Jaipur and finally made it their second home in 1984. They taught at University of Rajasthan also. They taught at University of Chicago from 1964 to 2002, till their retirement.\nThey now live at Kensington, California.\n\nWorks \n\nTheir works as follow:\n Essays on Rajasthan\n The Idea of Rajasthan\n The Modernity of Tradition: Political Development in India\n Education and Politics in India\n The Regional Imperative: The Administration of US Foreign Policy Towards South Asian States\n Gandhi: The Traditional Roots of Charisma\n Essays on Rajputana\n In Pursuit of Lakshmi: The Political Economy of the Indian State\n Reversing the Gaze: The Amar Singh Diary, a Colonial Subject's Narrative of Imperial India\n Postmodern Gandhi and Other Essays: Gandhi in the World and at Home\n\nAwards \n\nThey were awarded Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award in India, by Government of India in 2014.\n\nReferences \n\nYear of birth missing (living people)\nLiving people\nHistorians of India\nHarvard University alumni",
"Dahala Khagrabari (#51) () was an Indian enclave located on the Bangladesh–India border belonging to the district of Cooch Behar in the state of West Bengal. This was a piece of India within a piece of Bangladesh within a piece of India within Bangladesh, making it the only third-order enclave (or counter-counter enclave) in the world until 1 August 2015, when it was ceded to Bangladesh.\n\nIt was one of the smallest——of the Indo-Bangladesh enclaves, albeit not the smallest of the 106 Indian exclaves inside Bangladesh and 92 Bangladeshi exclaves inside India.\n\nOverview\nDahala Khagrabari (#51) was completely encircled by the Bangladeshi village of 'Upanchowki Bhajni, 110' itself contained in the Indian village of Balapara Khagrabari, itself contained in the Debiganj, Rangpur Division, Bangladesh. Thus Dahala Khagrabari was the enclave of an enclave of an enclave. In practice, it was a parcel of land used for farming and was not actually inhabited. It was separated by a few metres (yards) of Bangladeshi land from its first-order Indian enclave.\n \nThe owner of this enclave was a Bangladeshi farmer who lived in the enclave surrounding Dahala Khagrabari (#51).\n\nDespite its small size, Dahala Khagrabari (#51) was not the smallest of the enclaves found on the Indo-Bangladesh border, the smallest being Panisala No. 79, an Indian enclave of in the Rangpur Division of Bangladesh.\n\nBecause of a lack of governance and unfavourable conditions faced by residents of the enclaves, in September 2011 the governments of India and Bangladesh announced their intention to resolve the issue by means of swapping 162 enclaves, giving residents a choice of nationality. On 6 May 2015, India ratified the Land Boundary Agreement and agreed to cede the enclave to Bangladesh.\n\nSee also \n India–Bangladesh enclaves\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading \n \nAbheek Barman (23 April 2016). Celebrate our newest voters. The Economic Times.\n\nGeography of West Bengal\nBangladesh–India border\nFormer enclaves\nGeography of Rangpur Division"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career"
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did Weldon have a college career?
| 1 |
Did Weldon Humble have a college career?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"Weldon City School District or Weldon City Schools is a school district headquartered in Weldon, North Carolina.\n\n it, along with the Halifax County School District, has a student body that is almost all of races other than non-Hispanic white, while the student body of Roanoke Rapids Graded School District is 70% white.\n\nSchools\n Weldon STEM High Career Academies (Weldon High School)\n Weldon Middle School\n Weldon Elementary Global Academy\n Roanoke Valley Early College\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Weldon City School District\nSchool districts in North Carolina\nEducation in Halifax County, North Carolina",
"Walter Frank Raphael Weldon DSc FRS (15 March 1860 in Highgate, London – 13 April 1906 in Oxford) generally called Raphael Weldon, was an English evolutionary biologist and a founder of biometry. He was the joint founding editor of Biometrika, with Francis Galton and Karl Pearson.\n\nFamily\nWeldon was the second child of the journalist and industrial chemist, Walter Weldon, and his wife Anne Cotton. On 13 March 1883, Weldon married Florence Tebb, daughter of the social reformer William Tebb.\n\nLife and education \nMedicine was his intended career and he spent the academic year 1876-1877 at University College London. Among his teachers were the zoologist E. Ray Lankester and the mathematician Olaus Henrici. In the following year he transferred to King's College London and then to St John's College, Cambridge in 1878.\n\nThere Weldon studied with the developmental morphologist Francis Balfour who influenced him greatly; Weldon gave up his plans for a career in medicine. In 1881 he gained a first-class honours degree in the Natural Science Tripos; in the autumn he left for the Naples Zoological Station to begin the first of his studies on marine biological organisms.\n\nOn his religious views, he considered himself an agnostic. He died in 1906 of acute pneumonia, and is buried at Holywell Church, Oxford.\n\nCareer\n\nUpon returning to Cambridge in 1882, he was appointed university lecturer in Invertebrate Morphology. Weldon's work was centred on the development of a fuller understanding of marine biological phenomena and selective death rates of these organisms.\n\nIn 1889 Weldon succeeded Lankester in the Jodrell Chair of Zoology at University College London, and as curator of what is now the Grant Museum of Zoology, and was elected to the Royal Society in 1890. Royal Society records show his election supporters included the great zoologists of the day: Huxley, Lankester, Poulton, Newton, Flower, Romanes and others.\n\nHis interests were changing from morphology to problems in variation and organic correlation. He began using the statistical techniques that Francis Galton had developed for he had come to the view that \"the problem of animal evolution is essentially a statistical problem.\" Weldon began working with his University College colleague, the mathematician Karl Pearson. Their partnership was very important to both men and survived Weldon's move to the Linacre Chair of Zoology at Oxford University in 1899. In the years of their collaboration Pearson laid the foundations of modern statistics. Magnello emphasises this side of Weldon's career. In 1900 he took the DSc degree and as Linacre Professor he also held a Fellowship at Merton College, Oxford.\n\nWeldon was one of the first scientists to provide evidence of stabilizing and directional selection in natural populations.\n\nBy 1893 a Royal Society Committee included Weldon, Galton and Karl Pearson 'For the Purpose of conducting Statistical Enquiry into the Variability of Organisms'. In an 1894 paper Some remarks on variation in plants and animals arising from the work of the Royal Society Committee, Weldon wrote:\n\n\"... the questions raised by the Darwinian hypothesis are purely statistical, and the statistical method is the only one at present obvious by which that hypothesis can be experimentally checked.\"\n\nIn 1900 the work of Gregor Mendel was rediscovered and this precipitated a conflict between Weldon and Pearson on the one side and William Bateson on the other. Bateson, who had been taught by Weldon, took a very strong line against the biometricians. This bitter dispute ranged across substantive issues of the nature of evolution and methodological issues such as the value of the statistical method. Will Provine gives a detailed account of the controversy. The debate lost much of its intensity with the death of Weldon in 1906, though the general debate between the biometricians and the Mendelians continued until the creation of the modern evolutionary synthesis in the 1930s.\n\nAfter his death, the Weldon Memorial Prize was established by the University of Oxford in his honour; it is awarded annually.\n\nWeldon's dice\nIn 1894, Weldon rolled a set of 12 dice 26,306 times. He collected the data in part, 'to judge whether the differences between a series of group frequencies and a theoretical law, taken as a whole, were or were not more than might be attributed to the chance fluctuations of random sampling.' Weldon's dice data were used by Karl Pearson in his pioneering paper on the chi-squared statistic.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences \n\nW.B. Provine (1971) The origins of theoretical population genetics. University of Chicago Press.\nMagnello E. 2001. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon, in Statisticians of the Centuries (eds C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta) p261-264. New York: Springer.\nShipley A.E. 1908. Walter Frank Raphael Weldon. Proc Roy Soc Series B 1908 vol 80 pxxv-xli.\n\nExternal links\n\n \n\n \n\"On Certain Correlated Variations in Carcinus moenas\" Proceedings of the Royal Society, 54, (1893), 318–329. An example of Weldon's use of statistical methods\nPhotograph of Weldon on the Portraits of Statisticians page.\n \n\nEvolutionary biologists\nEnglish agnostics\nEnglish statisticians\nEnglish zoologists\nBiostatisticians\nFellows of the Royal Society\nAcademics of University College London\nAlumni of St John's College, Cambridge\nFellows of St John's College, Cambridge\nFellows of Merton College, Oxford\nAlumni of University College London\nAlumni of King's College London\n1860 births\n1906 deaths\nDeaths from pneumonia in England\nLinacre Professors of Zoology\nPeople from Highgate\nJodrell Professors of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,"
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did he play a certain position?
| 2 |
Did Weldon Humble play a certain position at the Southwestern Louisiana Institute?
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Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
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lineman
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Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"George William Humphreys (15 March 1870 – 11 May 1933) was an English-born New Zealand rugby union player who represented the All Blacks in 1894. His position of choice was loose forward. Humphreys did not play in any test matches as New Zealand did not play their first until 1903.\n\nHumphreys was born in Wolverhampton, England and moved to New Zealand at the age of 17.\n\nHe died in Rotorua in 1933.\n\nCareer \nHumphreys played nine games for the province between 1891 and 1894.\n\nHe played in Canterbury's match against the touring NSW side.\n\nBased on his performances he was then selected for the national team in their match against the tourists which was conveniently played in Christchurch. Humphreys scored a try, however the match was lost 8-6.\n\nHe may have played again in 1897 but this is far from certain.\n\nFarming \nHumphreys purchased Willencote, a farm located in Gisborne in 1918. His acquisition contained 1,827 acres of land. In 1923 the ownership was then handed to his son, Frank. The farm is currently owned and operated by the 4th generation of the Humphreys family. The farm size is now smaller, being 1,040 acres.\n\nFamily \nHis son, Frank \"Fred\" Edwin Humphreys represented between 1919 and 1920.\n\nReferences \n\n1870 births\n1933 deaths\nNew Zealand international rugby union players\nNew Zealand rugby union players\nRugby union players from Wolverhampton",
"is a former Japanese football player.\n\nPlaying career\nIwamaru was born in Fujioka on December 4, 1981. After graduating from high school, he joined the J1 League club Vissel Kobe in 2000. However he did not play as much as Makoto Kakegawa until 2003. In 2004, he played more often, after Kakegawa got hurt. In September 2004, he moved to Júbilo Iwata. In late 2004, he played often, after regular goalkeeper Yohei Sato got hurt. In 2005, he moved to the newly promoted J2 League club, Thespa Kusatsu (later Thespakusatsu Gunma), based in his home region. He competed with Nobuyuki Kojima for the position and played often. \n\nIn 2006, he moved to the newly promoted J1 club, Avispa Fukuoka. However he did not play as much as Yuichi Mizutani. In 2007, he moved to the newly promoted J1 club, Yokohama FC. However he did not play as much as Takanori Sugeno and the club was relegated to J2 within a year. Although he did not play as much as Kenji Koyama in 2008, he played often in 2009. He did not play at all in 2010. \n\nIn 2011, he moved to the J2 club Roasso Kumamoto. He did not play as much as Yuta Minami. In 2013, he moved to the newly promoted J2 club, V-Varen Nagasaki. Although he played in the first three matches, he did play at all after the fourth match, when Junki Kanayama played in his place. In 2014, he moved to the J2 club Thespakusatsu Gunma based in his local region. However he did not play at all, and retired at the end of the 2014 season.\n\nClub statistics\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n \n\n1981 births\nLiving people\nAssociation football people from Gunma Prefecture\nJapanese footballers\nJ1 League players\nJ2 League players\nVissel Kobe players\nJúbilo Iwata players\nThespakusatsu Gunma players\nAvispa Fukuoka players\nYokohama FC players\nRoasso Kumamoto players\nV-Varen Nagasaki players\nAssociation football goalkeepers"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman"
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?
| 3 |
Anything about Weldon Humble's early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"Billy the Kid is a children's novel by the English author Michael Morpurgo, first published in 2000.\n\nPlot summary \nBilly, an 80-year-old Chelsea Pensioner, looks back on his life. As a boy he loved football and was chosen to play for Chelsea Football Club. His youthful brilliance earned him the nickname of \"Billy the Kid\". Then his life was interrupted by the start of the Second World War and Billy joined the army. When he returned home, injured, he found that his home had been bombed and his whole family killed.\n\nHe became a vagrant but was later befriended by a family and encouraged their son Sam to play football. Sam grew up to play for Chelsea just like Billy did.\n\nPublication information \nHarperCollins Children's Books, reissued 2009. .\n\nReferences \n\n2000 British novels\nBritish children's novels\nEnglish novels\nNovels set during World War II\nBritish sports novels\nChelsea F.C.\nNovels by Michael Morpurgo\nChildren's historical novels\n2000 children's books\nAssociation football books",
"Mel Winkler (October 23, 1941 – June 11, 2020) was an American actor, perhaps best known as the voice of Aku Aku in the Crash Bandicoot video games, from Crash Bandicoot: Warped to Crash Twinsanity.\n\nEarly life \nWinkler was born in St. Louis, Missouri on October 23, 1941.\n\nCareer \nIn 1969, Winkler began a tap dancing career in Anything Goes. In 1970s and 1980s, He moved to New York City. Though Winkler mostly appeared in minor live-action roles, such as Melvin in Doc Hollywood, in 1978 he appeared in a two-show Anything Goes as Lord Evelyn Oakleigh and West Side Story as Action. He also spent time on Broadway, appearing in The Great White Hope in 1968, in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone in 1988 and in Neil Simon's Proposals from 1997 to 1998. He is the voice of the guardian mask Aku Aku in the Crash Bandicoot series, Lucius Fox in The New Batman Adventures and Johnny Snowman in the TV series Oswald. In 2004, he appeared in The Tap Dance Kid as Dipsey.\n\nDeath \nWinkler died in his sleep on June 11, 2020. The cause of his death was not disclosed. The video game Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time is dedicated to his memory.\n\nFilmography\n\nFilm\n\nTelevision\n\nVideo games\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n\n1941 births\n2020 deaths\nAfrican-American male actors\nAmerican male film actors\nAmerican male television actors\nAmerican male voice actors\nAmerican male video game actors\nAmerican tap dancers\nMale actors from St. Louis\n20th-century American male actors\n21st-century American male actors\n20th-century African-American people\n21st-century African-American people"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?
| 4 |
Did Weldon Humble do well in college as far as academics and sports?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"Sir John Hunt Community Sports College is a mixed secondary school and sixth form located in the Whitleigh area of Plymouth in the English county of Devon. The school is named after Sir John Hunt (afterwards Baron Hunt), an army officer who is best known as the leader of the successful 1953 British Expedition to Mount Everest.\n\nHistory\nThe school was originally known as Whitleigh Secondary Modern School and then Sir John Hunt Community College, before gaining Sports College Status. In 2001 Southway Community College formally merged with Sir John Hunt. Although the school operated over both school campuses for a time, the school was consolidated on the Whitleigh site completely in 2005. Sir John Hunt opened its sixth form in 2010, the last secondary school in Plymouth to do so.\n\nThe school is located in the Wood View Learning Community, which also includes Whitleigh Community Primary School and Woodlands Special School, as well other community services such as the Youth Centre. The campus is run by a federated Governing Body. Previously a community school solely administered by Plymouth City Council, in June 2015 Sir John Hunt Community Sports College became a foundation school as part of the Wood View Learning Community Trust. However the school continues to coordinate with Plymouth City Council for admissions.\n\nAcademics\nSir John Hunt Community Sports College offers GCSEs and Cambridge Nationals as programmes of study for pupils, while students in the sixth form have the option to study from a range of A-levels and further Cambridge Nationals. Some courses are offered in conjunction with Lipson Co-operative Academy and Tor Bridge High.\n\nNotable former pupils\nKate Nesbitt, The first female member of the British Royal Navy, and the second woman in the British Armed Forces, to be awarded the Military Cross\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nSir John Hunt Community Sports College official website\n\nSecondary schools in Plymouth, Devon\nFoundation schools in Plymouth, Devon\nSpecialist sports colleges in England",
"Michael Carwood, was an Irish sports journalist, musician and songwriter.\n \nBorn in Dublin in 1948, he was educated at Dundrum National School and Oatlands College in Dublin.\n\nIn 1968, he started working for The Irish Press, becoming a journalist, and becoming sports editor of The Sunday Press in 1988.\n\nFollowing the closure of The Irish Press, he worked freelance for the Irish Independent and The Irish Times, and also lectured in Journalism at the Dublin Institute of Technology.\n\nA musician who played keyboards and sang with Showbands such as The Gnumps and The Others, with Ronan Collins.\nHe wrote the song The Boys in Green the official song of Irish European Championship team in 1988. Another song he wrote She is mine which entered the Irish charts for The Others, as well as Why must they die and If you go away.\n\nHe died aged 54 on 2 October 2002, in Greystones, County Wicklow.\n\nReferences\n\n1948 births\n2002 deaths\nIrish Independent people\nIrish sports journalists\nJournalism teachers\nAcademics of Dublin Institute of Technology\nPeople educated at Oatlands College\nThe Irish Press people\nThe Irish Times people\nThe Sunday Press people"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant"
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did he win any college games?
| 5 |
Did Weldon Humble win any college games?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| false |
[
"Alex Hadley (born 14 September 1973) is an Australian Paralympic swimmer from the United Kingdom. He was born in Staines, England. He competed but did not win any medals at the 1996 Atlanta Games. At the 2004 Athens Games, he won a gold medal in the Men's 4 × 100 m Medley 34 pts event and a silver medal in the Men's 4 × 100 m Freestyle 34 pts event. He also competed but did not win any medals at the 2008 Beijing Games.\n\nReferences\n\nMale Paralympic swimmers of Australia\nSwimmers at the 1996 Summer Paralympics\nSwimmers at the 2004 Summer Paralympics\nSwimmers at the 2008 Summer Paralympics\nMedalists at the 2004 Summer Paralympics\nParalympic gold medalists for Australia\nParalympic silver medalists for Australia\nEnglish emigrants to Australia\nPeople from Staines-upon-Thames\n1973 births\nLiving people\nParalympic medalists in swimming",
"Brian Scott Michael Baima (born April 14, 1949) is a former American football player. He grew up in Los Angeles, California, and played college football for Valley College in 1968 and 1969 and for The Citadel Bulldogs football team in 1970 and 1971. He was the first junior college transfer at The Citadel who was not obligated to participate in the Corps of Cadets. In 1971, he caught 63 passes for 1,230 yards and 13 touchdowns in 11 games. He led the NCAA major colleges in 1971 in receiving yards. He was selected as the Southern Conference athlete of the year for the 1971–1972 academic year. He was the first athlete in any sport from The Citadel to win the award. He tried out with the New England Patriots in 1972 but did not appear in any NFL regular season games. He played for the Montreal Alouettes of the Canadian Football League in 1974. He appeared in eight games for the Alouttes and caught 10 passes for 219 yards, including a 67-yard reception and run for a touchdown against the Winnipeg Jets on July 4, 1974. He married Brenda Channell in 1984.\n\nSee also\n List of college football yearly receiving leaders\n\nReferences\n\n1949 births\nLiving people\nAmerican football ends\nThe Citadel Bulldogs football players\nPlayers of American football from Los Angeles\nLos Angeles Valley Monarchs football players\nGrant High School (Los Angeles) alumni"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 6 |
Besides Humble playing in college and enlisting in the United States Marine Corps, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| 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"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
What happened next?
| 7 |
What happened next after Humble being named a sophomore all-star?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| false |
[
"What Happens Next may refer to:\n\n What Happens Next? (film), 2012 documentary film about Dan Mangan\nWhat Happens Next? (band), American thrashcore band\n What Happens Next (Gang of Four album), 2015\nWhat Happens Next (Joe Satriani album), 2018\nWhat Happens Next (What Happened Then?), a 1984 album by American hardcore punk band Ill Repute\n\nOther uses\n What Happens Next?: A History of Hollywood Screenwriting, a book by Marc Norman\n\nSee also\n What Comes Next (disambiguation)",
"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"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.",
"What happened next?",
"The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
What was the best record of all his teams and seasons combined?
| 8 |
What was the best record of all Weldon Humble's teams and seasons combined?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
7-2-1 record.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| false |
[
"The Nashville Vols Minor League Baseball team played 62 seasons in Nashville, Tennessee, from 1901 to 1963; they were inactive in 1962 due to declining attendance and the Southern Association (SA) ceasing operations after 1961. Over 9,015 regular season games, the Vols compiled a win–loss record of 4,569–4,446 (.507). They qualified for postseason playoffs on 16 occasions and had a postseason record of 108–74 (.593). Nashville won eight SA pennants, nine SA playoff championships, and four Dixie Series titles. Combining all 9,197 regular season and postseason games, the Vols had an all-time record of 4,677–4,520 (.509).\n\nThe Nashville Baseball Club was formed as a charter member of the newly organized Southern Association in 1901. The team did not receive its official moniker, the Nashville Volunteers, until 1908. However, the team was, and is, commonly referred to as the Vols. Their last season in the Southern Association was 1961. After sitting out the 1962 season, Nashville returned for a final campaign as a part of the South Atlantic League in 1963.\n\nThe Vols competed at four class levels: Class B (1901), Class A (1902–1935), Class A1 (1936–1945), and Double-A (1946–1961, 1963). Today, all Minor League Baseball teams are affiliated with a Major League Baseball team to develop players for the major league club. However, it was not until the 1930s that Nashville entered into such major league affiliations on a consistent basis. The Vols were affiliated with eight teams across 29 seasons and were unaffiliated in the other 33 seasons. Their longest affiliation was with the Chicago Cubs for nine seasons (1943–1951), followed by the Cincinnati Reds/Redlegs (8 seasons; 1936–1937, 1955–1960), New York Giants (5 seasons; 1934–1935, 1952–1954), Brooklyn Dodgers (3 seasons; 1938–1940), and one season each with the Cleveland Naps (1908), Minnesota Twins (1961), Chicago White Sox (1920), and Los Angeles Angels (1963).\n\nThe team's best season record occurred in 1940 when they finished 101–47 (.682). The 1940 team was ranked as the 47th best minor league of all time in a 2001 ranking by baseball historians. Their lowest season record was 45–92 (.328) in 1906. Of the eight major league affiliations in Nashville's history, the team recorded its best record from 1938 to 1940 as a Brooklyn Dodgers affiliate. The team had a regular season record of 270–181 (.599) during that time. They reached the postseason in all three seasons, winning two playoff championships and one Dixie Series title. Their postseason record was 25–16 (.610). Conversely, the team's lowest record was as a Los Angeles Angels affiliate in 1963. The Vols compiled a 53–86 (.381) record and failed to reach the postseason in their lone year with the Angles and their final year of competition.\n\nTable key\n\nSeason-by-season records\n\nFranchise totals\n\nReferences\n\nSeasons",
"Raymond Albert Nolting (November 8, 1913 – July 5, 1995) was an American football halfback for the Chicago Bears of the National Football League (NFL), as well as a college football head coach. He played college football at the University of Cincinnati, before spending six seasons with the Bears. He rushed for over 2,000 yards, and had over 500 receiving yards before retiring in 1943. He was a member of Chicago Bears NFL Championship teams in 1940, 1941 and 1943 and selected to the Pro Bowl twice. In the 1940 Bears' 73–0 rout of the Washington Redskins, Nolting rushed for 68 yards and a touchdown and intercepted a Sammy Baugh pass. From 1945 to 1948, he coached at Cincinnati, where he compiled a 23–15–1 record.\n\nCollege career \nWhile at the University of Cincinnati, the football team compiled a record of 20-6-1 and won two Buckeye Conference titles in 1934 and 1935. While individual statistics are virtually nonexistent, reports credit Nolting with fifteen 200-plus yards rushing games during his three-year varsity career. Ray was named All Buckeye Conference in 1934 and 1935. After the 1935 season, Ray was named All Ohio (team captain) and was an All American honorable mention.\n\nNolting was the first UC football player to make the All American team and to go on to play professional football. He had the reputation of being a hard-nosed runner, fierce competitor, an explosive runner and a true triple threat. Run. Pass. Kick.\n\nIn addition to playing football for the Bearcats, Ray playing basketball his senior year and was on the track and field team in 1933–1935.\n\nNFL career \nOne story had it Ray joined the Bears so he could play with Bronko Nagurski and not against him. The wisdom of this move was confirmed in the first Bear scrimmage, when he found himself on the opposite team from the Bronk. While Nolting was a virtual unknown in Chicago, early in his rookie year he proved his value. Nolting got his first chance to start in the second Packer/Bear game In '36. Beattie Feathers hurt his ankle and Ray was sent into the game. The Bears ran an of-tackle play and Bronk (Bronko Nagurski) made about 15 yards. Nolting blocked and knocked down the Packer's Hall of Fam linebacker Clarke Hinkle to lead the play. Bronk came back to the huddle and said \"anyone who could knock that Hinkle on his ass can play on my first team.\" \"Halas always listened to Bronk. Anything Bronko wanted... Bronko got. From that time on, I was a first string player.\" recalled Nolting in a 1985 interview.\n\nWhile Nolting was used primarily for his blocking skills to lead the way for the likes of Bronko Nagurski, Sid Luckman, Bill Osmanski and George McAfee, Ray was a vital member of three World Championship teams (1940, 1941, and 1943) and five divisional championship teams. Playing in a galaxy of all-time NFL greats, Nolting was elected MVP three times. In 1937, Ray was an honorable mention on the All-Pro team and was named the league's “fastest starting back” and “best quick kicker”.\n\nIn 1940, the year the Bears beat the Washington Redskins 73–0 in the World Championship game, Nolting lead the Bears in total yards, yards per carry, and had intercepted four passes. Nolting was also a big member of the 1942 team which was undefeated during the regular season (11-0) only to be upset by the Washington Redskins 14–6 in the championship game.\n\nDuring Nolting's eight-year career, the Chicago Bears amasses a record of 73 wins, 19 losses and two ties – a 77.6% winning percentage. The Bears were the only team to win two more World Championships over the next 20 seasons.\n\nIn all, Ray was named team MVP three times. Nolting was All-Pro leading his teams to an overall record of 69-17-2 with an 89% winning percentage. Nolting's teams won 5 Western Division Championships and were World Champions In 1940, 1941 and 1943.\n\nCollege coaching career \nNolting was hired to revive the University of Cincinnati football program after the conclusion of World War II. Manned with many veterans of the armed services, he quickly put the program back together. In four seasons, they compiled a 23-15-1 record.\n\nNolting had his own style; fairly fundamental with strong offensive play combined with a hard-nosed defense like the Bears.\n\nOf Nolting, the team captain of the 1946 Bearcats, Elbie Nickel, said, \"He was a tough couch and insisted on long practices and repetitive drills, but he wasn't above getting into the action with his team. He wasn't much older than we were... so he could show us what to do. He was a young couch and he did a great job for us. Of course, he had a little temper and he's get a bit excited on the sidelines.\"\n\nThe 1946 team has been ranked as one of the university's best ever with victories over Big Ten Champion Indiana (15-7) and Michigan State while compiling an 8–2 record.\n\nThe 1946 Bearcats were league champions and appeared in UC's first bowl game. At that time, there were only five bowl games. UC played in the Sun Bowl in El Paso, Texas, defeating Virginia Tech 18–6.\n\nHead coaching record\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n raynolting.com\n\n1913 births\n1995 deaths\nAmerican football halfbacks\nCincinnati Bearcats football coaches\nCincinnati Bearcats football players\nChicago Bears players\nCoaches of American football from Ohio\nPlayers of American football from Cincinnati"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.",
"What happened next?",
"The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record.",
"What was the best record of all his teams and seasons combined?",
"7-2-1 record."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did Weldon set any records?
| 9 |
Did Weldon Humble set any records?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"Maxine Weldon is an American soul and jazz singer. She is also an actress and live performer. Her brother was actor/director Charles Weldon and one of her sisters is actress/singer Ann Weldon.\n\nWeldon recorded two albums in 1970-71, with members of The Jazz Crusaders playing as session musicians on the recordings. She followed these with Some Singin in 1974, which became her best-selling record, reaching #48 on the Billboard R&B albums chart. Her last album was issued in 1975. In the 1980s and 1990s, she performed frequently but did not record; in 1995-1997 she performed in the Broadway production of Black and Blue and later in the 1990s toured with Linda Hopkins.\n\nDiscography\nRight On (Mainstream, 1970)\nChilly Wind (Mainstream, 1971)\nSome Singin (Monument, 1974)\nAlone on My Own (Monument, 1975)\n\nReferences\n\nAmerican soul singers\nAmerican women singers\nLiving people\nMainstream Records artists\nMonument Records artists\nYear of birth missing (living people)",
"Cosmic Vortex – Justice Divine is a 1974 album by jazz keyboardist, Weldon Irvine. His first for RCA Records\n\nReception \nThe Allmusic review by Jason Ankeny awarded the album 4 stars stating:\nAfter two visionary LPs for his own tiny Nodlew label, Weldon Irvine signed to RCA for Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine), exploring the deeply spiritual and political terrain of his previous efforts on the kind of grand musical scale that major-label funding accommodates. This is a big, bold record by any measure, with a startlingly pronounced focus on lyrics and vocals. At the same time, however, the melodies spread out like tentacles, informed by the improvisational sensibilities of jazz and the deep-groove spirit of funk.\n\nTrack listings\nAll songs written by Weldon Irvine.\n\n\"Love Your Brother\" 5:15 \n\"Walk That Walk; Talk That Talk\" 7:50 \n\"Love Jones\" 4:11 \n\"I'll Name It Tomorrow\" 2:50 \n\"Cosmic Vortex (Justice Divine)\" 8:45 \n\"Quiet (In Memory of Duke Ellington)\" 5:06 \n\"Let Yourself Be Free\" 4:30 \n\"Love Your Brother (Sanctified Version)\" 1:30\n\nPersonnel\nWeldon Irvine - keyboards, soprano saxophone, vocals\nHenry Grate, Jr., Cornell Dupree, Joe Caro - guitar\nBob Cranshaw, Gordon Edwards, George Murray - bass\nWesley \"Gator\" Watson, Jimmy Young, Lenny White, Chipper Lyles - drums\nNapoleon Revels - percussion\nBud Johnson, Jr. - congas, bongos\nGene Jefferson - tenor saxophone\nJimmy Owens, Roy Roman, Everett \"Blood\" Hollins - trumpet\nBill Barnwell - flute\nNalo, Ojuleba - vocals\n\n\"With a special thanks to Tom Draper for his aid and support throughout.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Weldon Irvine-Cosmic Vortex - Justice Divine at Discogs\n\n1974 albums\nRCA Records albums\nWeldon Irvine albums\nAlbums conducted by Weldon Irvine\nAlbums arranged by Weldon Irvine"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.",
"What happened next?",
"The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record.",
"What was the best record of all his teams and seasons combined?",
"7-2-1 record.",
"Did Weldon set any records?",
"team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Who won the oil bowl?
| 10 |
Who won the oil bowl?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"The 1947 Oil Bowl was a college football postseason bowl game that featured the Saint Mary's Gaels and the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets.\n\nBackground\nIn Bobby Dodd's second year as coach of the Yellow Jackets, he guided them to a 4th-place finish in the Southeastern Conference, in their fifth bowl appearance in the decade. The Gaels were going to a bowl game for the second straight year.\n\nGame summary\nThe Gaels had eight passes intercepted, with W.P. McHugh returning one 73 yards for a touchdown. George Brodnax caught two touchdowns.\n\nAftermath\nPhelan left the program the following year to become coach of the Los Angeles Dons. This was the last bowl game the Gaels participated in before the dismantlement of the football program in 2004. The Yellow Jackets went to seven bowl games in the next 10 years.\n\nReferences\n\nOil Bowl\nGeorgia Tech Yellow Jackets football bowl games\nSaint Mary's Gaels football bowl games\nOil Bowl\nJanuary 1947 sports events",
"The 1946 Oil Bowl was a college football postseason bowl game featuring the Georgia Bulldogs and the Tulsa Golden Hurricane in the first Oil Bowl since 1944.\n\nBackground\nThe Bulldogs had finished 4th in the Southeastern Conference, compounded by losses to LSU and 6th ranked Alabama. This was their third ever bowl game. The Golden Hurricane had finished 2nd in the Missouri Valley Conference, but they were playing in their fifth bowl game of the decade.\n\nGame summary\nCharles Smith gave the Bulldogs a 7-0 lead on his 3 yard touchdown run. Tulsa responded with a Camp Wilson touchdown run, but their extra point failed, keeping it 7-6. John\nDonaldson caught a 64 yard pass from Charley Trippi to increase the lead. Trippi made the final score 20-6 on his 68 yard punt return, highlighted by him reversing his field and running over two Tulsa players near a sideline.\n\nAftermath\nFrkna would leave for Tulane after the game, and Tulsa did not appear in a bowl game again until 1953. Georgia went to three more bowl games before the decade ended.\n\nStatistics\n\nReferences\n\nOil Bowl\nGeorgia Bulldogs football bowl games\nTulsa Golden Hurricane football bowl games\nJanuary 1945 sports events\nOil Bowl"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.",
"What happened next?",
"The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record.",
"What was the best record of all his teams and seasons combined?",
"7-2-1 record.",
"Did Weldon set any records?",
"team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston.",
"Who won the oil bowl?",
"Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
|
Did he play football on the marines as well?
| 11 |
Did Weldon Humble play football on the marines as well?
|
Weldon Humble
|
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
|
Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War.
|
Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"he 2017–18 Rwandan Cup is the 36th season of the football cup competition of Rwanda.\nThe competition is organized by the Rwandese Association Football Federation (RAF) and open to all clubs in Rwanda.\n\nPreliminary round\nThe preliminary round are played on 30 January 2018.\n\nPlay-off round\nThe Play-off round are played on 3 February 2018.\n\nRound of 32\nThe Round of 32 are played on 6 & 7 February 2018 first legs and 21 & 22 February 2018 second legs.\nFirst leg\n\nSecond legs\n\n1–0 on aggregate. Sorwathe FC failed to turn up for the game.\n\nAmagaju won with 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nAS Kigali won with 6–1 on aggregate.\n\n2–2 on aggregate. Marines qualifies on Away goal rule.\n\nPolice won with 3–1 on aggregate.\n\nBugesera won with 2–0 on aggregate.\n\nMusanze won with 8–1 on aggregate.\n\nKiyovu Sports won with 11–3 on aggregate.\n\nMukura Victory Sports won with 3–0 on aggregate.\n\nPepiniere won with 4–1 on aggregate.\n\nAS Muhanga won with 2–1 on aggregate.\n\nEtincelles won with 4–0 on aggregate.\n\nSunrise won with 3–0 on aggregate, after Miroplast failed to turn up for the game.\n\n0–0 on aggregate. La Jeunesse won 5–4, after penalties.\n\nRound of 16\nFirst Legs\n\n[Apr 2]\n\nMukura 3-2 AS Kigali \n\nPepinière 0-1 Marines \n\nEspoir 2-1 Sunrise \n\n[Apr 3]\n\nLa Jeunesse 0-3 APR \n\nAS Muhanga 2-1 Amagaju \n\nMusanze 2-1 Police \n\n[Apr 4] \n\nKiyovu Sports 1-1 Bugesera \n\n[Apr 25]\n\nEtincelles 1-1 Rayon Sports \n \nSecond Legs\n\n[Apr 5]\n\nAS Kigali 1-2 Mukura \n\nSunrise 2-0 Espoir \n\nMarines 1-0 Pepinière \n\n[Apr 6]\n\nPolice 3-0 Musanze \n\nBugesera 0-0 Kiyovu Sports \n\nAPR 0-0 La Jeunesse \n\nAmagaju 1-0 AS Muhanga \n\n[May 23]\n\nRayon Sports 2-0 Etincelles\n\nQuarter-finals\nFirst Legs\n\n[Jul 20] \n\nSunrise 2-0 Bugesera \n\nMukura 1-0 Amagaju \n\nPolice 0-0 APR \n\n[Jul 21] \n\nMarines 0-1 Rayon Sports \n \nSecond Legs\n\n[Jul 23] \n\nAmagaju 0-0 Mukura \n\nBugesera 1-0 Sunrise \n\n[Jul 24] \n\nRayon Sports 3-1 Marines \n\n[Jul 26] \n\nAPR 3-0 Police\n\nSemi-finals\nFirst Legs \n\n[Aug 3]\n\nMukura 0-0 APR \n\n[Aug 6]\n\nSunrise 2-1 Rayon Sports \n\nSecond Legs \n\n[Aug 8]\n\nAPR 1-1 Mukura \n\n[Aug 9]\n\nRayon Sports 2-0 Sunrise\n\nThird place match\n[Aug 12]\n\nSunrise 0-1 APR\n\nFinal\n[Aug 12]\n\nMukura Victory Sports 0-0 (aet, 3-1 pen) Rayon Sport\n\nReferences\n\nFootball competitions in Rwanda\nRwanda",
"Eber Sampson (born c. 1895) was an American football player. He played professional football in the National Football League (NFL) as a fullback and halfback for the Minneapolis Marines. He appeared in 14 NFL games, 13 as a starter, from 1921 to 1923. He scored three NFL touchdowns. Two of his touchdowns were scored in a single game, a 28–0 victory over the Columbus Panhandles.\n\nSampson also served as the kicker for the Minnesota Marines, but statistical data is not available for kicks converted during the earliest years of the NFL. Likewise, statistical data is unavailable for rushing yardage, though an account of a game played on September 26, 1920, indicates that Sampson rushed for 116 yards on 26 carries and completed three of six passes for 52 yards. He was described in a November 1920 account as \"the individual star of the pastime for the Marines\" who made long gains on the ground, kicked well, and \"hurled forward passes with accuracy and speed.\"\n\nHe was known by the nickname \"Oats\".\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nYear of birth missing\nYear of death missing\nAmerican football fullbacks\nAmerican football halfbacks\nMinneapolis Marines players"
] |
[
"Weldon Humble",
"Early life and college career",
"Did Weldon have a college career?",
"Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute,",
"Did he play a certain position?",
"lineman",
"Anything about his early life, perhaps did he play football as a kid?",
"Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940.",
"Did he do well in college as far as academics and sports?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant",
"Did he win any college games?",
"After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record.",
"What happened next?",
"The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record.",
"What was the best record of all his teams and seasons combined?",
"7-2-1 record.",
"Did Weldon set any records?",
"team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston.",
"Who won the oil bowl?",
"Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.",
"Did he play football on the marines as well?",
"Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War."
] |
C_9d7da2bd79cf431f8b995b38ae8d6284_1
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Did anything happen while he was out at the pacific war?
| 12 |
Did anything happen while Weldon Humble was out at the pacific war?
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Weldon Humble
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Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940. Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6-3-1 win-loss-tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwestern Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7-2-1 record. Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwestern Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8-2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll. CANNOTANSWER
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He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal.
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Weldon Gaston "Hum" Humble (April 24, 1921 – April 14, 1998) was an American football guard who played five seasons in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC) and National Football League (NFL) for the Cleveland Browns and Dallas Texans in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Humble grew up in Texas and was a multi-sport athlete at Brackenridge High School in San Antonio. He enrolled at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940 and played three seasons on the school's football team. Humble then spent three years in the U.S. Marines during World War II, serving in the Pacific War and earning a Bronze Star Medal before returning to complete his college studies in 1946. Sportswriters named him a first-team All-American after the Rice Owls finished with an 8–2 win–loss record and beat Tennessee 8–0 in the 1947 Orange Bowl.
The AAFC's Baltimore Colts signed Humble in 1947, but the Browns acquired him in a trade before the season. Humble became an anchor on Cleveland's offensive line, helping the team win three straight AAFC titles in the late 1940s. When the AAFC dissolved in 1949, Cleveland moved to the NFL and won another championship in 1950. Humble, who remained in the Marine Reserves, was called into service in the Korean War after the season. He was expected to return to Cleveland the following year, but head coach Paul Brown traded him to the Texans before the 1952 season began. He retired after one year in Dallas.
After his playing career, Humble worked as a bank executive and at an office supply company. He was also the chairman of the selection committee for the Bluebonnet Bowl. Humble was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961, and was named to the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969. He is also a member of the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. He died in 1998 in Houston following a long illness.
Early life and college career
Humble was born in Nixon, Texas, a suburb of San Antonio, in 1921. His athletic career began at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School. Humble played as an end for two seasons and a fullback for a third season on the football team. He also played on the basketball, track and swimming teams before graduating and enrolling at Rice University in Houston, Texas in 1940.
Humble began play on Rice's freshman team as an end in 1940. He advanced to the varsity team the next year. While he started as an end, coach Jess Neely switched him to guard before the first game of the season. He thrived in the new position, and was named a sophomore all-star by the Associated Press after the Rice Owls finished 1941 with a 6–3–1 win–loss–tie record. The following year, Humble earned All-Southwest Conference honors and won the George Martin Award, given to Rice's most valuable player, as Rice put up a 7–2–1 record.
Humble left Rice in 1943 for the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then called Southwestern Louisiana Institute, to prepare for service in World War II in a V-12 U.S. Navy training program. As he trained, he played alongside enlistees from Tulane University, the University of Tulsa and Louisiana State University on a military team that won six straight games and was selected to play in the first Oil Bowl in Houston. Captained by Humble, Southwestern beat a service team from Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio. Halfback Alvin Dark loved playing behind Humble, recalling years later that "I'd never seen such blocking."
After the season, Humble enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and was sent to fight in the Pacific War. He rose to the rank of first lieutenant and won a Bronze Star Medal. Upon his discharge in 1946, Humble returned to Rice. He lettered in football and track and field and was voted a consensus first-team All-American guard while captain of Rice's Southwest Conference co-champion team. He was also named lineman of the week by the Associated Press in November for his strong tackling in a game against the Texas A&M Aggies. After finishing with an 8–2 record, Rice beat Tennessee in the Orange Bowl game in early 1947. Rice was ranked the 10th-best college team in the nation in the AP Poll.
Professional football career
Paul Brown, the coach of the Cleveland Browns in the All-America Football Conference (AAFC), met Humble while vacationing in Florida in 1946. Brown came to watch the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day, and was staying in the same hotel as the Rice team. He saw Humble and his wife Lorraine, whom Humble had met while in training at Southwestern, on a dance floor at the hotel. "He appeared to be the sort of fellow we like to have on our team," Brown said later in 1947. "Then I watched him in that Tennessee game and after that made up my mind he'd be with my club if I ever had the chance to make a deal for him." The AAFC's Baltimore Colts selected Humble in the league's draft, but Brown got his chance in August. He engineered a trade that sent four players including quarterback Steve Nemeth and guard George Cheroke to the Colts, plus two players to be named later.
Before joining the Browns, Humble played in the College All-Star Game, a now-defunct annual matchup between the National Football League (NFL) champion and a selection of the best college players from around the country. The college all-stars won the game, defeating the Chicago Bears 16–0. In Cleveland, Humble was part of an offensive line that included Lin Houston, Ed Ulinski and Bob Gaudio. Their job was to protect quarterback Otto Graham from opposing defenders and open up running room for fullback Marion Motley. They chanted "nobody touches Graham" when they broke the huddle.
Helped by strong line play, Graham, Motley and Cleveland ends Dante Lavelli and Mac Speedie led a potent offense that dominated the AAFC for three years. The Browns won the AAFC championship in 1947, 1948 and 1949 before the league disbanded and Cleveland was absorbed by the more established NFL. Humble was a consensus second-team All-Pro selection in 1948, when Cleveland won all of its games. Cleveland's success continued in the NFL in 1950, when Humble was used on occasion as a linebacker on defense. The Browns finished the season with a 10–2 record and beat the Los Angeles Rams in the NFL championship game. Humble was selected to play in the first-ever Pro Bowl, the NFL's all-star game.
Humble continued as a member of the Marine Reserves as his professional career continued, and in 1951 he was in danger of being called up for service in the Korean War. He re-enlisted in the summer and played for a military team at Marine Corps Base Quantico later in the year. After the season, he was named the best service player in the country by the Washington Touchdown Club.
Humble was expected to return to the Browns after his discharge from the military in 1952. In a surprise move, however, Brown traded him before the season to the Dallas Texans for fullback Sherman Howard. The trade was unexpected because Cleveland's other guards, including Gaudio and Alex Agase, were getting older and nearing retirement. "I'm sure we'll be all right at the guard position," Brown said at the time. "But we do have a definite fullback problem." Humble played one season for the Texans before retiring. Dallas had a 1–11 record in 1952.
Later life and death
After his football career, Humble worked for 20 years at First City National Bank in Houston. He later became vice-president of an office supply firm called Stationers, Inc. He maintained an affiliation with his Texas alma mater, serving as president and later director of the R Association, an alumni group for former Rice student-athletes. In the late 1960s, he became the president of the Greater Houston Bowl Association, which organized the Bluebonnet Bowl. By the mid-1970s, he was chairman of the Bowl's selection committee.
Humble won numerous honors after his career. He became the first Rice player inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1961. He was included on a 50th anniversary All-Southwest Conference team in 1968, and in 1970 was one of the first people inducted into the Rice University Athletics Hall of Fame. Humble was inducted into the Texas Sports Hall of Fame and the South Texas Football Hall of Fame in 1969.
Later in life, Humble worked for the Harris County Appraisal Review Board and was a salesman for an office furniture supply company. He died in 1998 in Houston after a long illness. Humble and his wife Lorraine had three children.
References
Bibliography
External links
1921 births
1998 deaths
All-American college football players
American football offensive guards
Cleveland Browns (AAFC) players
Cleveland Browns players
College Football Hall of Fame inductees
Dallas Texans (NFL) players
Eastern Conference Pro Bowl players
Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns football players
Players of American football from San Antonio
Rice Owls football players
University of Louisiana at Lafayette alumni
Brackenridge High School alumni
United States Marine Corps personnel of World War II
United States Marine Corps officers
United States Marine Corps reservists
| true |
[
"John B. Podesto, nicknamed Presto Podesto from Modesto (March 26, 1921 – November 13, 2015) was an American football quarterback and halfback who played for the St. Mary's Gaels. He was drafted in the first round (10th overall) in the 1944 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers but did not play for them. He later was signed by the Chicago Bears but did not play with them either.\n\nEarly life and education\nPodesto was born on March 26, 1921 in Modesto, California to Giovannia and Maria Podesto. He was the youngest of nine children. He attended Modesto High School and Modesto Junior College before continuing his education at Saint Mary's University and College of the Pacific. He excelled at baseball and football while at Modesto, Saint Mary's, and College of the Pacific. He played quarterback and halfback when he was in football. In 1943, under coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, Podesto was named All-American while at Pacific. While playing from 1941 to 1943, and from 1944 to 1945, Podesto entered the Marine Corps and achieved the rank of captain while in World War II.\n\nProfessional career\nPodesto was drafted with the 10th pick in the 1940 NFL Draft by the Pittsburgh Steelers. He was serving in the marines from 1944 to 1945 so he could not play with them. In 1946, he signed with the team. However, Podesto did not play with the Steelers. The next season he signed with the Chicago Bears but did not play with them, either.\n\nLater life\nAfter Podesto's sports career, he was a successful business owner. He worked with the Modesto Tallow Company for over 50 years. He died on November 13, 2015 at the age of 94. At the time of his death he had 5 children, 12 grandchildren, and 2 great-grandchildren.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\n1921 births\n2015 deaths\nSaint Mary's Gaels football players\nSaint Mary's Gaels baseball players\nPacific Tigers football players\nPacific Tigers baseball players\nPlayers of American football from California",
"Merriell Allesandro Shelton (January 21, 1922 – May 3, 1993) was a United States Marine who served in the Pacific theater during World War II. He is depicted in the 1981 memoir With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by Eugene Sledge which chronicled their combat experiences. He was also depicted in the HBO miniseries The Pacific (2010), in which he is portrayed by Rami Malek.\n\nBiography\n\nEarly life\nMerriell Shelton was born on January 21, 1922, in Louisiana. Of Cajun descent, Shelton was described as speaking with a \"thick accent\". He served in the Civilian Conservation Corps in his youth.\n\nMilitary career\nShelton enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1942 and completed boot camp in San Diego. He was assigned to K Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marine Division (K/3/5) and served as a mortar man. He participated in the Battle of Cape Gloucester alongside Romus Burgin.\n\nIn the book The Marines at Peleliu, 1944--The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War, author Bill Sloan describes Shelton as a \"whiz at poker, but otherwise his talents involved getting confused, lost, in trouble, and generally fouled up. He would argue about anything at the slightest opportunity, and when he was agitated or inebriated, all those tendencies grew more pronounced. They were also magnified by Shelton's inability to speak understandable English at such times\". \nSloan also describes how Shelton gained his nickname of \"Snafu\" after a fellow Marine asked him how much money he had while they were on a train in Melbourne:\n \"I t'ink I got maybe aroun' two pounds and ten ounces-plenty for some drinks an' poker, eh?\" to which Burgin replied, \"You know what you are, Shelton? You're just one big snafu lookin' for a place to happen\"\n\nHe met replacement, Eugene Sledge, on Pavuvu; and the two saw action under the command of Andrew Haldane during the Battle of Peleliu. Sledge's book details his experiences and friendship with Shelton on Peleliu and Okinawa; and Shelton would give Sledge the nickname \"Sledgehammer\". He was discharged from the Marine Corps in 1946 with the rank of corporal.\n\nLater life and death\nHe returned to Louisiana after the war and worked as an air conditioner repairman and in the lumber industry. He was married to Gladys Bowman-Shelton until his death and they had two sons, Allen and Floyd; the latter of which died before his father, in 1990. He and Sledge did not speak for over thirty-five years until he read Sledge's book and the two reunited. \n\nShelton died on May 3, 1993, in Jackson, Louisiana. Sledge was one of his pallbearers. He is buried at the Bowman-Dedon Cemetery, in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana alongside his wife.\n\nShelton's home was later the residence of serial killer Derrick Todd Lee.\n\nAwards\nHis decorations and medals include:\n\nSee also\nList of U.S. Marines\nList of people from Louisiana\nEugene Sledge\nRomus Burgin\n\nReferences\n\n1922 births\n1993 deaths\nUnited States Marine Corps personnel of World War II\nUnited States Marines\nCajun people\nPeople from Louisiana"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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when was kirby Pucketts First world Series
| 1 |
When was Kirby Puckett's first World Series?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
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"Kirby is an action-platform video game series developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo. The series centers around the adventures of a young, pink hero named Kirby as he fights to protect and save his home on the distant Planet Popstar from a variety of threats. The majority of the games in the series are side-scrolling platformers with puzzle-solving and beat 'em up elements. Kirby has the ability to inhale enemies and objects into his mouth, spitting them out as a projectile or eating them. If he eats certain things he can gain the powers or properties of that object manifesting as a new weapon or power-up called a Copy Ability. The series is intended to be easy to pick up and play even for people unfamiliar with action games, while at the same time offering additional challenge and depth for more experienced players to come back to.\n\nThe Kirby series includes a total of over thirty games, and has sold over 38 million units worldwide, making it one of Nintendo’s best-selling franchises and putting it in the top 50 best-selling video game franchises of all time.\n\nOverview \nThe series' main and namesake protagonist is an 8 inch tall spherical pink young creature named Kirby who resides on a distant five-point star-shaped planet called Popstar in Dream Land. Much of Dream Land is peaceful, and its people lead laid-back, carefree lives. However, when the peace in Dream Land is shattered by threats, both terrestrial and alien, it's up to Kirby to become a brave warrior and save his home. Despite his young and carefree personality, Kirby possesses many incredible abilities, such as the power to inhale objects and enemies, suck them into his stretchy mouth with the choice of spitting them out forcefully, or taking their properties while 'he ingests his enemies to Copy their abilities, transform into new forms and gain new powers; like breathing fire, wielding a sword, throwing sparks in all directions or attacking enemies in melee.\n\nMany recurring characters appear throughout the series as both allies and enemies. The most common being King Dedede, a gluttonous bird resembling a blue penguin and self-proclaimed ruler of Dream Land. King Dedede has appeared in all Kirby games except Kirby & the Amazing Mirror. King Dedede's selfish nature often leads him to clash with Kirby, but he sometimes teams up with Kirby when a greater threat emerges. Another major character in the series is the enigmatic Meta Knight, a chivalrous masked man who one day wishes to fight the strongest warrior in the galaxy and leads a group of like-minded warriors. Whenever he and Kirby fight, he will always offer Kirby a sword in advance so that the fight is fair. While his true face resembles Kirby's, his exact relationship with Kirby remains a mystery.\n\nThe main Kirby games are side-scrolling action platforms. Kirby has to run, jump, and attack enemies while traversing a number of areas, solving puzzles, and battling bosses along the way. One of the things that sets Kirby apart is Kirby's ability to inflate himself with a sip of air and fly. In most games, he can do this for as long as he wants, however, his attack options are limited.\n\nKirby games often contain a number of hidden items that unlock more parts of the game or are simple incentives to collect, and are usually required to reach 100% in-game completion. These special items are usually related to the plot of the game, most often used to create a special weapon needed to defeat the final boss. In some games, the special weapon is optional and can be used regularly in the game after defeating the final boss with it. These elements have remained constant in most series, with each game having its own unique twist to affect gameplay.\n\nThe fantasy world of Popstar games includes many regions of different climates and terrains, which are home to many different creatures. Each game features uniquely named areas, but all games feature typical locations such as flaming mountains, open grasslands, water-filled or submerged areas, frozen snowfields, and similar natural locations.\n\nThere are also several spin-off games in the series, which involve a variety of different game genres such as pinball, puzzle, racing, motion sensor technology based game. A number of these side games take advantage of Kirby's round, ball-shaped appearance.\n\nGames\n\n1990s\nThe first game in the Kirby series, Kirby's Dream Land for the original Game Boy, was released in Japan in April 1992 and later in North America in August that year. A simple game, consisting of five levels, it introduced Kirby's ability to inhale enemies and objects. The game contains an unlockable hard mode, known as the \"Extra Game\", which features stronger enemies and more difficult bosses. The North American box art showed a white Kirby, although the Japanese box art had the correct pink coloring.\n\nThe second game, Kirby's Adventure, was released in North America in May 1993. Kirby's Adventure gave Kirby the ability to gain special powers when he ate certain enemies, called Copy Abilities; the game contained a total of 25 different ones to use. These powers replaced Kirby's inhale and could be used until Kirby sustained damage causing him to drop the ability, or the player voluntarily discarded it to obtain another one. As one of the last games created for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Kirby's Adventure featured advanced graphics and sound that pushed the hardware's capabilities to the limit, including pseudo 3D effects on some stages. It was re-released in 2002 on the Game Boy Advance, retitled Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, featuring updated graphics and sound, multiplayer support, and the ability to play as Meta Knight.\n\nAfter Kirby's Adventure, the Kirby series received a number of spin-off games. Kirby's Pinball Land, released in November 1993, is a pinball game featuring Kirby as the pinball. Kirby's Dream Course, released in North America in February 1995, is a golf-based game which features an isometric graphic design. Kirby's Avalanche, released in February 1995 in North America and Europe, is a puzzle game, a westernized version of the Japanese game Puyo Puyo.\n\nKirby's Dream Land 2, released in Japan and North America in March 1995, brought the Copy Abilities from Kirby's Adventure to a handheld system, but due to system limitations lowered the number of abilities to seven. The game introduced three rideable animal companions: Rick the hamster, Coo the owl, and Kine the ocean sunfish. Pairing up with any of these three alters how Kirby's abilities work. The game was to be remade for the Game Boy Color as Kirby's Dream Land 2 DX, but was cancelled.\n\nKirby's Block Ball, released in November 1995 in North America, is a variation of the game Breakout, featuring multiple levels, some of Kirby's Copy Abilities, and various enemies in unique boss battles.\n\nKirby Super Star, known as Hoshi no Kirby Super Deluxe in Japan and Kirby's Fun Pak in Europe, was released in North America in September 1996. Kirby Super Star is composed of eight separate games, and features several characters and abilities which have not appeared since in the series. The game features \"Helpers\", which can be created by sacrificing the ability in use, to help the player dispatch enemies.\n\nIn 1996, a Kirby mini-game series, was released via the St.GIGA satellite broadcasting system for the Satellaview. These mini-games were given a unique broadcast date. Mini-game games included Arrange Ball, Ball Rally, Baseball, Cannonball, Guru Guru Ball, Hoshi Kuzushi, Pachinko, and Pinball.\n\nReleased in 1997, Kirby's Star Stacker is a puzzle game which involves touching two or more similar blocks together that have Kirby's animal friends on them. The game received a sequel on the Super Famicom in 1998 in Japan as Kirby no Kirakira Kizzu.\n\nKirby's Dream Land 3, released in November 1997 in North America, is a direct sequel to Kirby's Dream Land 2, as it featured the return of Kirby's animal friends. Similarly to Kirby's Dream Land 2, Kirby's Dream Land 3 features a few Copy Abilities which were modified when Kirby paired up with one of his six animal friends. The game had a multiplayer option with the second player controlling Gooey, a recurring character. The antagonist is Dark Matter, and if certain conditions are met, Zero was fought as the true final boss. The game had a unique pastel-drawing art style and used dithering to improve visual performance.\n\n2000s\nThe first game to have 3D graphics in the Kirby series, Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, was released on the Nintendo 64 in North America in June 2000. The game features a compound ability system that allows two of the seven abilities in the game to be merged, making a new compound ability. It also marked the first playable instance of King Dedede, where sections of some stages had Kirby riding piggyback while King Dedede attacked enemies and obstacles with his hammer. It is considered a direct follow-up to Kirby's Dream Land 3 due to the reemergence of Dark Matter and the final boss, albeit in a different form, called 02 (Zero Two). It also included three four-player minigames.\n\nThe next game in the Kirby series, Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble became one of Nintendo's first motion-sensor-based games in August 2000. Players are instructed to tilt the Game Boy Color to move Kirby on the screen. Quickly flicking the Game Boy Color upwards would make Kirby jump into the air. Kirby Tilt 'n' Tumble is the only Kirby game to have a special cartridge color (transparent pink) in North America.\n\nThe only Kirby game for the GameCube, Kirby Air Ride, was released in North America in October 2003. It is a racing game which deviates greatly from other Kirby games, although still featuring series staples including enemies and Copy Abilities.\n\nDuring the 2003 Holiday season, a Kirby e-Reader card for the Game Boy Advance was released. The card was released under two names, Kirby Slide and Kirby Puzzle. Swiping the card would allow for a sliding puzzle game starring Kirby to be played. Cards were given out at Toys \"R\" Us stores and in the 2003 December issues of Nintendo Power and Tips & Tricks. The game was released to advertise the English dub of Kirby: Right Back At Ya!\n\nKirby & the Amazing Mirror was released in October 2004 on the Game Boy Advance. It is the second game released on that system, following Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land. It features Kirby in a Metroidvania format, with all the levels being interconnected and able to be completed in any order. Also unique was the in-game phone, which can be used to summon up to three additional copies of Kirby to fight enemies and solve puzzles.\n\nThe next game in the series is Kirby: Canvas Curse, released on the Nintendo DS in Japan on March 24, 2005, North America on June 13, 2005, Europe on November 25, 2005, under the name Kirby Power Paintbrush, and Australia on April 6, 2006. Unlike most previous Kirby games, the player does not directly control Kirby with a directional pad, analog stick, face buttons, or shoulder buttons. Instead, Kirby is a helpless ball, and can only move when he gains momentum, the player painting paths with the stylus to direct his movement.\n\nThis was followed by Kirby: Squeak Squad (titled Kirby: Mouse Attack in Europe) in late 2006, also on the Nintendo DS, which revived traditional Kirby gameplay and dabbled in the use of the touch screen to store several items and Copy Abilities in Kirby's stomach. Ability scrolls could be found that served as upgrades for each ability, giving them additional moves and/or enhanced functionality. An unlockable Copy Ability was also introduced.\n\nKirby Super Star Ultra, announced for the Nintendo DS in early fall 2007 and released on September 22, 2008 in North America, is a remake of Kirby Super Star. In addition to the nine games from Kirby Super Star, seven new games have been added. It features updated graphics, pre-rendered cutscenes, and a map on the touch screen.\n\n2010s\n\nAn untitled Kirby platform game originally planned to be released on the GameCube was thought to be canceled for some time before being re-announced for the Wii. Although Kirby's Epic Yarn was announced and released for the Wii in 2010, it was a different project from the untitled game, which, in January 2011, resurfaced with an altered design and motif. Kirby's Epic Yarn began development as an original game by Good-Feel called Fluff of Yarn, but was given the Kirby license at Nintendo's proposal. The game got a remake/port on the 3DS in 2019 entitled, Kirby's Extra Epic Yarn. \n\nA fourth game for the DS was released in North America on September 19, 2011, Kirby Mass Attack. The game features multiple copies of Kirby in touch screen-based gameplay reminiscent of games such as Lemmings.\n\nThe aforementioned Wii game, Kirby's Return to Dream Land (tentatively titled Kirby Wii) was released on Wii in North America on October 24, 2011, returning to the traditional Kirby gameplay and allowing up to four players to play simultaneously. Players 2–4 could choose to play as Meta Knight, King Dedede and/or Waddle Dee, each with dedicated abilities; they could also play as different-colored Kirbys which offered power copying abilities, or as a mixture of the options.\n\nAn anthology disc for the Wii called Kirby's Dream Collection was released on July 19, 2012, in Japan and on September 16, 2012, in North America to celebrate Kirby's 20th Anniversary. It includes six games from the early history of the series, which are Kirby's Dream Land, Kirby's Adventure, Kirby's Dream Land 2, Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. It also has new Challenge Stages that run on the engine of Kirby's Return to Dream Land (known in Europe and Australia as Kirby's Adventure Wii), and a Kirby history section, which includes three episodes from Hoshi no Kirby (Kirby: Right Back at Ya! in North America). Similarly to the Super Mario 25th Anniversary packaging in 2010, a booklet and a soundtrack containing music from the various games in the series are released alongside the disc.\n\nOn October 1, 2013, a new Kirby game for the Nintendo 3DS was announced, later named Kirby: Triple Deluxe. The game was released in Japan on January 11, 2014, in North America on May 2, 2014, in Europe on May 16, 2014, and in Australasia on May 17, 2014. It incorporated action spanning varied depths, where Kirby could swap between the foreground and background areas. It included a multiplayer fighting mode called \"Kirby Fighters\", where players could choose one of ten available abilities and fight on themed stages, with the winner being the last Kirby standing. It also included a rhythm-based action game starring King Dedede. There were also over 250 in-game \"keychains\" to collect that featured sprites from previous Kirby games as well some original sprites based on characters from Triple Deluxe. In August 2014, Kirby Fighters Deluxe and Dedede's Drum Dash Deluxe (enhanced versions of the mini-games in Kirby: Triple Deluxe) were released.\n\nAt E3 2014, a new game for the Wii U was announced. Titled Kirby and the Rainbow Curse, the game is a direct sequel to Kirby: Canvas Curse and features a similar gameplay style. It was released by Nintendo on January 22, 2015, in Japan, February 20, 2015, in North America, May 8, 2015, in Europe and May 9, 2015, in Australasia.\n\nIn March 2016, during a Nintendo Direct, Nintendo unveiled a new game based on the context of Kirby: Triple Deluxe called Kirby: Planet Robobot. This game is the second Kirby game released on the Nintendo 3DS. It was released alongside a set of Amiibo figures made for the Kirby franchise, including a newly announced Amiibo, Waddle Dee, on April 28, 2016, in Japan, June 10, 2016, in North America and Europe, and June 11, 2016, in Australasia. The game is compatible with other Amiibo. It also includes 2 new minigames, called Kirby 3D Rumble and Team Kirby Clash, the former being an arena based, 3D action game where Kirby uses his inhale to defeat large groups of baddies to rack up points and achieve a high score, and the latter being a mix of fighting, platform, and role-playing. Players can level up to level 10, and can play with AI or other friends.\n\nIn a Nintendo Direct in April 2017, three new Kirby games were announced for Kirby's 25th Anniversary. The first game was Team Kirby Clash Deluxe, an upgraded version of the Kirby: Planet Robobot mini-game \"Team Kirby Clash\". It was announced and released on April 12. The second game was Kirby's Blowout Blast, an upgraded version of the Kirby: Planet Robobot mini-game \"Kirby 3D Rumble\" which was released on July 4, 2017, in Japan, and on July 6, 2017, in North America, Europe and Australasia. The third game was Kirby Battle Royale, an action-multiplayer fighting game which was released on November 3, 2017, in Europe and Australasia, November 30, 2017, in Japan, and January 19, 2018, in North America.\n\nAt E3 2017, Nintendo unveiled a new installment for the Nintendo Switch, Kirby Star Allies. The game was released on March 16, 2018. Kirby can throw Friend Hearts to turn enemies into computer- or player-controlled allies, a variation of the \"Helper System\" from Kirby Super Star. \"Power Combinations\" return from Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards and Kirby: Squeak Squad. Kirby can also summon \"Dream Friends\", consisting of major Kirby characters acting as Helpers, which includes King Dedede, Meta Knight, Bandana Waddle Dee, Rick, Kine, & Coo, Marx, Gooey, Adeleine & Ribbon, Dark Meta Knight, Daroach, Magolor, Taranza, Susie, and The Three Mage-Sisters (Francisca, Flamberge, and Zan Partizanne).\n\nIn September 2019, Nintendo released a new Switch game, Super Kirby Clash, on the Nintendo eShop.\n\n2020s \nIn September 2020, Nintendo released a new Switch game, Kirby Fighters 2, on the eShop, as the successor to Kirby Fighters Deluxe. Before its official reveal, the game was leaked on the Play Nintendo website, but was later taken down. The game expands on the previous installment with new gamemodes and an exclusive ability, Wrestler.\n\nDuring the September 23, 2021 Nintendo Direct, a new title in the Kirby series was revealed, titled Kirby and the Forgotten Land. It will be the first true 3D entry in the mainline series (fourth overall since the spin-offs Kirby Air Ride, Kirby's Blowout Blast, and Kirby Battle Royale) and is scheduled to be released on March 25, 2022.\n\nFictional universe\nThe setting of the games is Dream Land, a country on Planet Popstar. Popstar resembles a five-pointed star encircled by two diagonal rings.\n\nWhile most of Kirby's adventures take place on Popstar, his journeys occasionally take place on an interplanetary scale; such as in Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, Milky Way Wishes from Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Return to Dream Land, and Kirby Star Allies.\n\nNature of the protagonist\n\nKirby is a small, pink, spherical creature with red feet, stubby flap-like arms and pink cheek-blushes. He is referred to as male in the animated series, and described as a young boy in the instruction manual for Kirby's Dream Land. His body is soft and flexible, allowing him to stretch his mouth to inhale foes or inflate himself with air and float. According to Super Smash Bros. instruction manual, he is 8 inches tall; this is contradicted in Kirby's Dream Land 3 and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards, the former of which shows Kirby to be at about knee height compared to Samus Aran and the latter of which showing him to be a few inches shorter than the human girl Adeleine.\n\nKirby hails from the country of Dream Land on Planet Popstar, where he lives in a domed house. His appearance has changed subtly over the years, becoming more rounded and defined, mainly in his face and larger eyes. The new design has been used in all subsequent games.\n\nKirby does not commonly speak, mainly limited to grunts, shouts, and monosyllables in such games as Super Smash Bros and Kirby 64: The Crystal Shards. However he does speak in the stories written in some games' instruction manuals. He rarely speaks in-game, the only exception being Kirby's Avalanche. He narrates the functions of Copy Abilities on the start menu in Kirby: Nightmare in Dream Land, Kirby & the Amazing Mirror and Kirby: Squeak Squad. Most in-game talking Kirby does is in Kirby's Star Stacker, where Kirby explains the game's rules and gameplay. Kirby has dialogue in Kirby's Epic Yarn, but it is all spoken through the game's narrator.\n\nOther media\n\nAnime\n\nThe Kirby series was made into an anime on October 6, 2001, Hoshi no Kaabii. It was produced by Warpstar Inc., a company formed between a joint investment between Nintendo and HAL Laboratory, Inc. It was licensed in North America by 4Kids Entertainment, under the title Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, on 4Kids TV, and was distributed by 4Kids Entertainment in North America and Nelvana Limited in Canada, with VHS and DVD distributions in North America by FUNimation Entertainment and DVD distributions in Australia by Magna Pacific. It ended in Japan in 2003 with 100 episodes.\n\nThe show is about the adventures Kirby has with his friends Tiff and Tuff after he crash lands in Dream Land, on Pop Star. Here, he is a legendary Star Warrior destined to save the universe from the intergalactic conqueror known as Nightmare. However, because he was awakened 200 years too early he arrived in a childlike state and his powers haven't fully developed. The ruler of Dream Land, King Dedede, is jealous of the attention Kirby receives from its inhabitants and frequently orders monsters from Nightmare's company, Nightmare Enterprises, in an attempt to do away with Kirby. Nightmare Enterprises at first appears to be an intergalactic delivery company, but is really a front for Nightmare's intergalactic conquest that dupes unsuspecting customers into funding Nightmare's armies. Not yet ready to achieve his destiny, Kirby must learn how to use his incredible abilities with the help of his friends, and sometimes with the help of the enigmatic Meta Knight, who while he claims to be loyal to King Dedede, will often work behind the scenes in order to aid Kirby or train him in the use of his abilities.\n\nThe show is based on the game series, but rather than being a direct adaptation of any of the games it uses characters and concepts from the games (especially Kirby's Dream Land, Kirby's Adventure, and Kirby Super Star) to tell its own story.\n\nComics and manga\nKirby stars in several manga series that have been drawn by over 20 manga artists.\n\nThe longest running Kirby manga, Kirby of the Stars: The Story of Dedede Who Lives in Pupupu, was serialized in CoroCoro Comic from 1994 to 2006, and released 25 tankōbon volumes with over 10 million copies being printed. The series was written and illustrated by Hirokazu Hikawa. The series was later published as a \"best-of\" collection, which featured the series' first new chapter in 11 years, as well as bonus comics. It was published in English as Kirby Manga Mania by Viz Media.\n\nCanceled games\nIn the lifetime of the Kirby series, several video games have been in development that, for various reasons, were ultimately abandoned. These include Kirby's Air Ride 64 (also known as Kirby Bowl 64 and Kirby Ball 64) on the Nintendo 64, which was eventually released on the GameCube as Kirby Air Ride.\n\nKirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble 2 on the GameCube, which was supposed to use a combination of motion-sensor technology and connectivity to the Game Boy Advance via the Nintendo GameCube Game Boy Advance Cable, was presented during the Nintendo Space World 2001 and scheduled for a May 2002 release in Japan. The Kirby-theme was eventually scrapped and Kirby was replaced with a generic marble, and the game was shown again at E3 2002 as Roll-O-Rama, but eventually canceled completely.\n\nKirby Family was a Game Boy Color piece of software developed by Natsume that would connect to a compatible Jaguar JN-100 or JN-2000 sewing machine and embroider cloth with a Kirby pattern of choice. The game was also shown during Nintendo Space World 2001 and scheduled for September 10, 2001, but presumably canceled due to poor sales of Mario Family which released two weeks prior. The game was leaked on September 9, 2020 as part of the Game Boy Color lotcheck leak.\n\nThere was also a planned game called Kid Kirby that was to be released on the Super Nintendo. The game would have served as a prequel to the series and would have utilized the SNES Mouse. The game was canceled due to the declining sales of the mouse; however, early screenshots of the canceled game have been posted online. This unreleased game was developed by DMA Design for Nintendo and was scheduled for 1995.\n\nThough resurfaced as Kirby's Return to Dream Land, the GameCube was initially going to have its own original Kirby game, simply titled Kirby for Nintendo GameCube at the time. It was nearly complete and featured at E3 2005, but was canceled due to troubles incorporating a unique multiplayer mechanic, which became the special attack in Kirby's Return to Dream Land (where all players stack on each other, hold A and release at the same time). At a later point, the game was concepted as a full 3D platformer visually similar to Kirby Air Ride, but also canceled because it did not achieve HAL Laboratory's quality standards. Several concepts from the game would be revitalized in Kirby Star Allies and Kirby and the Forgotten Land for the Nintendo Switch.\n\nKirby in other video games\n\nKirby appears as a character in Nintendo's crossover fighting game series Super Smash Bros. (also developed by series creator Masahiro Sakurai), appearing in all installments of the franchise. Starting with Super Smash Bros. Brawl onwards, he's joined by Meta Knight and King Dedede. Many items from the Kirby series also appear in Super Smash Bros such as the Maxim Tomato (all games), Warp Star (since Melee), Dragoon (since Brawl) and Star Rod (all games) as items, and Knuckle Joe (Brawl and 3DS/Wii U), Nightmare (3DS/Wii U) and Chef Kawasaki (Ultimate) appear as characters summoned by the Assist Trophy. All playable Kirby characters in Smash Bros. have the ability to jump more than twice. Kirby has also made cameo appearances in other games as well, such as The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, EarthBound, Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga and Stunt Race FX.\n\nReception\nThe Kirby games have received reception that ranges from mixed to very favourable reviews by players and critics. Kirby's Epic Yarn is the most acclaimed game in the series, while Kirby Battle Royale is the lowest-rated.\n\nThe Kirby manga has over 10 million copies in print.\n\nSales\nMany Kirby games have performed commercially well, selling at least one million or more copies worldwide. Only games that have sold at least one million are included in this list. Kirby's Dream Land, the first game in the series, is currently the best-selling game in the series, whereas Kirby Mass Attack is the lowest-selling in millions.\n\nAs a brand, the series sold $150 million to $200 million worth of merchandise in 2002.\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nOfficial website\nOfficial website \n\n \nHAL Laboratory games\nNintendo franchises\nVideo game franchises\nFantasy video games\nVideo games about children\nVideo games about shapeshifting\nVideo games about magic\nVideo games adapted into television shows\nVideo game franchises introduced in 1992",
"is a Japanese manga series based on the video game series of the same name written and illustrated by Hirokazu Hikawa. The series follows the adventures of Kirby and his friend Chirby, who are on a quest to return the Star Rod, the legendary treasure of Dream Land.\n\nThe manga ran in Shogakukan's monthly CoroCoro Comic from May 1994 through November 2006, and was released in 25 individual tankōbon volumes. A special chapter was published in the December 2017 winter issue of CoroCoro Aniki, where it has been continued to be serialized. Viz Media planned to release the manga in North America in 2010, but it was cancelled. The manga was later published as a \"best-of\" collection with new chapters, which was published in English as Kirby Manga Mania by Viz Media.\n\nCharacters \n\nAside from Kirby himself, the manga features many of the characters from the Kirby series of games, including Meta Knight, King Dedede, and many of the regular enemies and bosses from the games as well.\n\nPublication \nKirby of the Stars was originally serialized in CoroCoro Comic from May 1994 to November 2006. It has been released into 25 volumes, which have over 10 million copies in circulation. The December 2017 winter issue of CoroCoro Aniki featured the series' first new chapter in 11 years, and the next issue would also feature a new chapter. The July 2018 issue revealed that Hikawa was resuming the Kirby manga. CoroCoro Aniki ended publication in print in the spring 2021 issue, where Kirby and other manga would continue to be published online.\n\nAt New York Anime Festival 2009, Viz Media revealed that they would be releasing the Kirby manga in North America, with a planned release date of September 7, 2010. The date was pushed back, and was eventually cancelled.\n\nThe series would later be published as a \"best-of\" collection, featuring a selection of chapters that Hikawa considers the best, in addition to bonus comics. It was published in English as Kirby Manga Mania by Viz Media, with the first volume being published on June 8, 2021.\n\nReception \nReviewers have mostly criticized the manga for its repetitiveness, characterization, and lack of character development and plot, with its fast paced slapstick comedy being attributed to its target audience of children.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Kirby of the Stars on the official CoroCoro website (in Japanese)\n Kirby (manga) at Anime News Network's encyclopedia\n\nKirby (series)\nManga series\n1994 manga\nComedy anime and manga\nShogakukan manga\n\nManga based on video games\nViz Media manga"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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What position did he play in outfield
| 2 |
What baseball position did Kirby Puckett play in outfield?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
| true |
[
"In baseball, a utility player is a player who typically does not have the offensive abilities to justify a regular starting role on the team but is capable of playing more than one defensive position. These players are able to give the various starters a rest, or replace a starter due to injury, or play late in a game to provide improved defense when their team is winning.\n\nDescription\nUtility infielders typically play both second base and shortstop, sometimes also third base, and more rarely first base. A \"fourth outfielder\" is likewise an outfielder who can play all three outfield positions but does not have the hitting skills to be a starting player. Some utility players have the defensive ability to play in both the infield and outfield—recent players in Major League Baseball (MLB) fitting this description include Marwin González, Brock Holt, Cory Spangenberg, and Ben Zobrist.\n\nPlaying time for fourth outfielders has been called \"erratic and unpredictable\". Often, fourth outfielders are outfield prospects who have not settled on one outfield position when arriving in the major leagues, veteran players seeking additional playing time to extend their careers, or part-time position players who double as designated hitters.\n\nNotable utility players\n\nWithin MLB, César Tovar, Cookie Rojas, Bert Campaneris, Shane Halter, Don Kelly, Jose Oquendo Scott Sheldon, and Andrew Romine all played every position (including pitcher) during their respective careers, with Tovar, Campaneris, Halter, Sheldon, and Romine all doing it in one game.\n\nLuis Sojo is considered to be the classic modern utility player in baseball, as he was a natural shortstop, but could also play third base, second base, first base, and even left field. It was said that in emergency situations, he could even play a bit of catcher.\n\nIn 1991, the Detroit Tigers' Tony Phillips was the first player to start 10 games at five different positions in the same season.\n\nIn 2005, Chone Figgins started 48 games at third, 45 in center field and 36 at second, and finished 17th in American League Most Valuable Player balloting.\n\nSecond baseman Ben Zobrist of the Chicago Cubs has played first base, second base, third base, shortstop and outfield; José Bautista of the Toronto Blue Jays has played first base, second base, third base, and outfield; and Josh Harrison of the Pittsburgh Pirates has played second base, shortstop, third base, outfield, and pitcher. All three have been named All Stars while playing multiple positions in their All-Star seasons. Zobrist and Bautista both finished in the top 10 in MVP voting while starting at least 40 games at two different defensive positions.\n\nIn 2015, Brock Holt of the Boston Red Sox was the first player ever to be selected to the All Star Game after starting at seven or more positions before the All-Star break.\n\nWillians Astudillo of the Minnesota Twins has played every position except for shortstop in his brief major league career, despite having less than a half-season of cumulative experience.\n\nSee also\n Two-way player#Baseball\n\nReferences\n\nBaseball positions",
"An outfielder is a person playing in one of the three defensive positions in baseball or softball, farthest from the batter. These defenders are the left fielder, the center fielder, and the right fielder. As an outfielder, their duty is to catch fly balls and ground balls then to return them to the infield for the out or before the runner advances, if there is any runners on the bases. As an outfielder, they normally play behind the six players located in the field.\nBy convention, each of the nine defensive positions in baseball is numbered. The outfield positions are 7 (left field), 8 (center field) and 9 (right field). These numbers are shorthand designations useful in baseball scorekeeping and are not necessarily the same as the squad numbers worn on player uniforms.\n\nOutfielders named to the MLB All-Century Team are Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Pete Rose, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Ken Griffey Jr.\n\nStrategy\n\nPlayers can be characterized as either corner outfielders or a center fielder. Corner outfielders are often slower and have less defensive value than the center fielder. However, there are some important differences between right fielders and left fielders. Right fielders tend to have the best throwing arms of the outfield so they can make the long throw to third base, but often are not as fast as left fielders. Center fielders are generally the fastest and most athletic of the three, because they have to run the farthest in order to field balls in the gaps and back up the other outfielders when balls are hit to them. Outfielders should also be able to read where the ball may be placed based on what the pitcher is throwing. They can tell what the pitcher is throwing by the middle infielders, second base and short stop, in which they show the numbers the catcher is giving to the pitcher behind their back to determine the pitch and tell where the ball could possibly be hit to.\n\nMany of the best power hitters in baseball play in the outfield, where they do not have as constant involvement in fielding plays as other positions, especially before the institution of the designated hitter. For example, Babe Ruth was moved from pitcher to the outfield. Left fielders and right fielders are more often slow power hitters, and center fielders are usually fast base-runners and good defensive players. Center field is often considered the most difficult outfield position, requiring both a good throwing arm and speed. Center fielders on many teams often bat lead off.\n\nPlayers who do not routinely start games, but often substitute as a pinch hitter or defensive replacement in the outfield are referred to as fourth outfielders or even fifth outfielders. These players can usually play any of the three outfield positions.\n\nCorner outfielders\nCorner outfielders are outfielders who play the corner positions of right field and left field. Corner outfielders often have less speed than center fielders, but make up for this deficiency with their offensive play. The main differences between left and right fielders are, first, that left fielders handle more chances because right-handed pull hitters tend to hit balls to left; second, that right fielders typically have stronger arms; third, that right fielders are frequently (not always) slower and less agile defensively. Many left fielders have had the speed to play center field, but have lacked the throwing ability required.\n\nAn example of an ultra-fast left fielder is Rickey Henderson (Ben Oglivie and Lou Brock can fit this description too), whereas the slow-footed but very strong-armed Carl Furillo, \"The Reading Rifle,\" sets a standard for right fielders in the terms specified here.\n\nGorman Thomas is an example of the reverse theory. He was a centerfielder his entire career (mainly with the Milwaukee Brewers), but was not nearly in shape as the typical player for this position. He compensated for it with sheer hustle and determination.\n\nOften, when an outfield prospect arrives in the majors, he plays both corner positions before settling at one or another.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\nBaseball positions"
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"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI"
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C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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Did the Twins win their first world series?
| 3 |
Did the baseball team Twins win the Twins first world series?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,
|
Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
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"The 1987 World Series was the championship series of Major League Baseball's (MLB) 1987 season. The 84th edition of the World Series, it was a best-of-seven playoff played between the American League (AL) champion Minnesota Twins and the National League (NL) champion St. Louis Cardinals. The Twins defeated the Cardinals four games to three to win the Series. Twins pitcher Frank Viola was named as the 1987 World Series MVP.\n\nIt was the first World Series to feature games played indoors, and the first in which the home team won every game; this happened again in (also a Twins championship, over the Atlanta Braves) and in with the Arizona Diamondbacks defeating the New York Yankees.\n\nThe World Series win was the first for the Twins franchise since , when it was located in Washington, D.C., and known as the Washington Senators.\n\nThis was the third of four World Series played entirely on artificial turf, with the others in , , and .\n\nThis is the first World Series in which the series logo appeared on the jerseys; only the Cardinals wore it. Both contestants in the following year's World Series wore a patch.\n\nAs of 2021, this is the last time 3 straight World Series went to 7 games.\n\nSummary\nThe 1987 World Series was notable in several regards: It featured the first World Series games played in an indoor stadium (the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome) and, to date, the last World Series game to start earlier than prime time in the eastern United States (Game 6 started at 4:00 p.m. ET/3:00 p.m. CT), and it was the first World Series in which all games were won by the home team. (Four previous series had the home team winning the first six games, including the 1965 World Series, when the Twins dropped Game 7 to the Dodgers.) The bottom half of the ninth inning was never played in any game of this Series, the first and only time this has happened. In 1987, the Twins set the record for the worst (full 162 game) regular season win-loss record of any World Series championship team (85–77, .525). This record stood until it was broken when the Cardinals won the 2006 Series after going 83–78 (.516).\n\nBesides setting a record for the worst regular season winning percentage for a World Series winner and hosting the first World Series game indoors, the Twins were the first team to enter the World Series having been outscored in the regular season. The Twins, as a team, were outnumbered in virtually every major statistical category in 1987. As ABC play-by-play commentator Al Michaels put it in the pre-game show for Game 1 \"They were out everything!\"\n\nThe Cardinals posted a 95–67 record during the regular season, but were affected by injuries throughout the postseason, most notably with the loss of their lone home run threat, first baseman Jack Clark, due to a sprained right ankle suffered in a game in Montreal on September 9. During the regular season, Clark led the National League in both on-base percentage and slugging percentage despite playing in Busch Memorial Stadium, which was reputed to be the league's most extreme \"pitcher's park.\" He hit 35 home runs in 131 games, and was the only person on the team to hit more than 12. The player on the team who hit 12, starting third baseman Terry Pendleton (though named to the World Series roster) was hampered with a ribcage injury. Normally a switch-hitter, Pendleton was only able to swing lefthanded during the World Series and was also unable to play the field and thus was relegated to pinch-hitting duties or being the designated hitter in the games in Minnesota started by right-handed starters.\n\nGame 7 was won by Minnesota on the 35th birthday of the Twins' Roy Smalley – and was also the last game of his career. Smalley appeared in four games as a pinch-hitter and reached base all four times on a double, an error, and two walks.\n\nMatchups\n\nGame 1\n\nA raucous, sold-out Metrodome met the Cardinals on October 17, stunning them at times with the degree of noise. The crowd noise in the Metrodome could exceed 110 decibels SPL. The Cardinals struggled defensively, with outfielder Willie McGee losing sight of pop flies against the Metrodome's white roof in the fourth and eighth innings, and infielder Tom Lawless committing an infield error in the sixth inning. However, none of those miscues contributed to Twins runs. The Twins' aggressive play further compounded the problems of the Cards, and the game ended as a 10–1 blowout. Starting pitcher Frankie \"Sweet Music\" Viola had little trouble with the Cardinals' potent lineup. For the Twins, Dan Gladden hit a grand slam and totaled five RBIs, capping off a seven-run fourth inning, with Steve Lombardozzi adding a two-run homer, while Kent Hrbek had two RBIs.\n\nFrank Viola was scheduled to be best man at his brother's wedding, but had to cancel when the Twins reached the World Series as it fell on the same night as Game 1, in which he was scheduled as starter. ABC showed clips of the wedding throughout the game's broadcast.\n\nCoincidentally, the song \"U Got The Look\" peaked in popularity (#2 on the Billboard singles chart) on this date. The song was written and performed by Prince (a lifelong Minneapolis resident) and contains the line \"boy versus girl in the World Series of love\".\n\nGame 2\n\nWhile improving on their game one performance, the Cards were unable to hold the Twins offense again and fell behind 7–0 before beginning to rally. The Cards' total of nine hits was just one short of the Twins but their bats lacked power as they managed only one double against three doubles and two home runs hit by Minnesota. Gary Gaetti hit a homer in the second inning. The Twins broke the game open in the fourth, scoring six runs resulting in starter Danny Cox being pulled from the game. The final score was 8–4. Randy Bush and Tim Laudner each came through with a pair of two-run-scoring hits in the fourth, with Laudner's being a home run and Bush's being a double. Bert Blyleven pitched seven innings of two-run baseball for the win.\n\nGame 3\n\nTraveling down the Mississippi, to the open air of Busch Stadium, Game 3 saw a tense pitching duel between Twins starter Les Straker and John Tudor of the Cardinals. This match-up was also notable for Straker being the first Venezuelan to pitch in a World Series game.\n\nAfter five scoreless innings by both teams, the Twins broke through in the top of the sixth inning. Greg Gagne walked to lead off the inning, and Kirby Puckett walked to move Gagne into scoring position. Tom Brunansky's RBI single looked like all the offense the game would see. But, in the bottom of the seventh, Juan Berenguer, in relief of Straker, surrendered leadoff back-to-back singles to Jose Oquendo and Tony Peña. Terry Pendleton sacrificed the runners to second and third, and Vince Coleman slammed a two-run double to give the Cards a 2–1 lead. Ozzie Smith followed by singling in Coleman for the final run, and Todd Worrell closed out saving the win for Tudor.\n\nGame 4\n\nIn Game 4, the Twins scored first on Greg Gagne’s home run, but the Cardinals tied it on a Jim Lindeman RBI single. Tom Lawless hit a three-run homer in the fourth off Viola (only his second Major League homer after going 2 for 25 during the regular season), one of Viola's five earned runs in the game and six runs in the fourth. However, the Cards weren't done scoring. Dan Schatzeder allowed another RBI single to Lindeman and a two-run double to Willie McGee. Joe Niekro and George Frazier shut the Redbirds out the rest of the game. Bob Forsch got the win with innings of one run relief. Starter Greg Mathews was injured in the fourth inning and was unable to play for the rest of the series. Ken Dayley got the save.\n\nJust prior to Game 4, Reggie Jackson, who was working as a field reporter for ABC's coverage of the 1987 World Series, admitted that he didn't know who Tom Lawless was.\n\nGame 5\n\nGame 5 was a much closer contest, with the Cardinals coming out victorious by a score of 4–2. Curt Ford hit a two-run single in the sixth, breaking a scoreless pitcher's duel between Danny Cox and Bert Blyleven. By the end of the seventh, the Cards were up 4–0. The Twins scored two in the eighth on a triple by Gary Gaetti off reliever Todd Worrell and made a game of it but eventually relinquished the save to him as Gaetti failed to score. The Cardinals stole five bases in Game 5, the most for team since the 1907 Chicago Cubs.\n\nGame 6\n\nThe Series returned to the Metrodome with the Twins facing elimination (a position they would find themselves in four years later against the Atlanta Braves). ABC allowed the game to be played at 3 p.m. CT (4 p.m. ET) on Saturday afternoon – the only day game of the series, and the last World Series game to date to be played in the daytime (although as the game was played in the Metrodome, the game took place under artificial lighting).\n\nThe Cardinals drew first blood off Les Straker on a Tommy Herr home run in the first, and the Twins countered with two in their half of the first on RBI singles by Kirby Puckett and Don Baylor. The Cardinals soon tied it in the second on a Jose Oquendo RBI single.\n\nIn the fourth, the Cards chased Straker when Dan Driessen led off with a double to right and went to third on a Willie McGee single. McGee took second on the attempted throw home by center fielder Kirby Puckett. Terry Pendleton followed by singling home Driessen and Oquendo hit a sacrifice fly to make it 4–2. Another run scored for the Cards in the fifth when lefty Dan Schatzeder walked Ozzie Smith. Smith went to second on a groundout, to third on a flyout, and scored on another McGee single.\n\nBut, in the bottom of the fifth, the Twins began to claw back against John Tudor. Puckett led off with a single and was doubled in by Gary Gaetti. Benefitting from use of the designated hitter in their home ballpark, the Twins then tied it on a mammoth home run by their DH, Don Baylor. After Tom Brunansky followed with a single, the Twins took the lead for good when Steve Lombardozzi singled him with two out on a close play at the plate.\n\nThe Twins then blew the game open in the sixth. Greg Gagne led off with an infield single and Puckett walked. A passed ball by Tony Peña advanced the runners. With first base open and one out, Cards veteran Bob Forsch intentionally walked Baylor to load the bases. After Brunansky popped out, left-hander Ken Dayley was brought in to face the lefty-hitting Kent Hrbek. Hrbek finally broke out of his slump and hit a grand slam.\n\nBrunansky drove in the final run in the eighth and the Twins had staved off defeat. This is the last day game in World Series history.\n\nGame 7\n\nThe 500th World Series game played, Game 7 forced a National Football League game between the Denver Broncos and the Minnesota Vikings, originally scheduled for that afternoon at the Metrodome, to be played the following night (also on ABC).\n\nJoe Magrane of the St. Louis Cardinals became only the sixth rookie pitcher to start the seventh game of a World Series. He also is the only pitcher in World Series history to start Games 1 and 7 of a World Series without any starts in between, as the Cardinals' Game 4 starter, Greg Mathews, had had to be removed early due to an injury and was unavailable for the remainder of the Series. Magrane had actually started the 1987 season pitching for the Cardinals Triple-A team, the Louisville Redbirds.\n\nIn the second, the Cardinals looked poised to send Frank Viola to an early shower. Three straight no-out singles by Jim Lindeman, Willie McGee, and Tony Peña plated the first run. Viola settled down to retire the next two hitters, but then Steve Lake singled in McGee for a 2–0 lead. Viola settled into a groove, however, and allow only two more hits and no runs in eight strong innings.\n\nThe Twins came back in their half of the second on a Steve Lombardozzi RBI single, but not before a missed call at home plate by umpire Dave Phillips had already cost the Twins a run. Twins DH Don Baylor reached base on a hit-by-pitch by Magrane to lead off the inning and Tom Brunansky singled him to second. With one out, Tim Laudner singled to left and Baylor was called out at home on a throw from Vince Coleman in left, while replays clearly showed Baylor was safe. Lombardozzi then singled in Brunansky.\n\nIn the fifth, the Twins tied the score when Greg Gagne reached on an infield hit and Kirby Puckett drove him in with a double. Incidentally, replays showed Gagne to be out on his infield hit, thus this run served to counteract the run the Twins lost in the second on the missed call on Baylor at the plate. The Twins seemed on the verge of taking the lead when Gary Gaetti followed Puckett with a walk and went to second when Puckett was thrown out by Lake trying to advance to third on a wild pitch that was deflected when it hit the home plate umpire in the face-mask. Baylor followed with a single to left, but Coleman threw out Gaetti at the plate in a violent collision with Lake. Coleman became the first outfielder to throw two runners out at the plate in one World Series game.\n\nThe sixth inning proved to be controversial. In the top of the sixth, Tom Herr had hit a single with one out. With Jim Lindeman at bat, the third missed call of the game would occur. On a 3-2 count, Herr would get caught in a rundown and Lombardozzi ran him back to first where Kent Hrbek was standing off the bag near the basepath. Lombardozzi tossed the ball towards Hrbek and the ball sailed past him but into the glove of Viola behind the bag. Viola had come over to take part in the rundown. Herr was hindered by Hrbek returning to the bag, but clearly reached the bag safely before Viola tagged him. However, first base umpire Lee Weyer called Herr out. Weyer's view was blocked by Kent Hrbek and, according to the broadcast crew, Viola made the tag late and Hrbek should have been called for interference. Had this been called, Herr would have been safe, awarded second base, and the Cardinals would have had a runner at second with one out. It was the third missed call of the game for the normally highly regarded Weyer—often considered one of the best umpires in baseball. The next pitch, Lindeman flied out to right field to end the 6th inning. The Twins then took the lead in the bottom of the inning, off Danny Cox, who had relieved Magrane the previous inning. Cox walked Brunansky and Hrbek to lead off, and was replaced by Todd Worrell. As Cox was leaving, he got into an argument with home plate umpire Dave Phillips and was ejected as he was leaving the field. As of 2020, Cox is the last non-manager to be ejected from a World Series game. After retiring the first batter he faced, Worrell walked pinch-hitter Roy Smalley and struck out Dan Gladden for the second out. The next batter, Gagne, reached first on an infield hit as Brunansky scored the go-ahead run.\n\nThe Twins' final run came in the eighth on an RBI double by Dan Gladden off Worrell, who stayed in the rest of the game for the Cardinals. Jeff Reardon retired the side in the ninth to give Minnesota their first World Series victory.\n\nTwins manager Tom Kelly became the youngest non-playing manager to win the World Series since John McGraw in 1905.\n\nBy winning in the regulation nine innings, the Twins ensured the 1987 World Series was the first in which no games needed the bottom of the ninth inning. No other World Series since then has had that happen, as the two other Fall Classics in which the home team won every game—1991 and 2001—both included extra inning games and walk-off wins in the bottom of the ninth.\n\nmlb.com coverage of Game 7\n\nComposite box\n1987 World Series (4–3): Minnesota Twins (A.L.) over St. Louis Cardinals (N.L.)\n\nAftermath\nAlthough Steve Carlton was not on the Twins' playoff roster, he still attended the White House to be congratulated by President Reagan. While making a photo op with the president, local newspapers listed the names of all of the Minnesota Twins. The only man who wasn't listed (and simply identified as a Secret Service agent) was a tall man wearing dark sunglasses in the back. The man in question was Carlton.\n\nAfter their defeat in the '87 Series, the Cardinals' reign of dominance in the '80s ended. They failed to win their division again until 1996, did not return to the World Series until 2004 and did not win until 2006 in a season where they won two fewer regular season games than the 1987 Twins.\n\nIn 1988, the Twins actually won more games than in their championship season, finishing with a 91–71 record. They finished 13 games behind the AL West champion Oakland A's, who won 104 games. The Twins eventually sank towards the bottom of the standings, finishing last in 1990. In 1991, the Twins returned to the playoffs by beating the Blue Jays in the ALCS and winning what many call the greatest World Series played over the Atlanta Braves.\n\nThe 1987 World Series featured at least two players who went on to win Manager of the Year awards. The Twins' Don Baylor won it in 1995 for his work with the Colorado Rockies while the Cardinals' Tony Peña won it in 2003 for his work with the Kansas City Royals.\n\nThe success of the 1987 Twins inspired Brandon Walsh (Jason Priestley) in Beverly Hills 90210 to explain why the Twins were the ultimate definition of a team, thus enabling him to win the Dreyer Scholarship. However, his interview included a factual inaccuracy; he said Gladden hit a grand slam in the pivotal Game 4, when in fact Gladden hit one in Game 1, and Hrbek hit one in the pivotal Game 6.\n\nSome years after the conclusion of the series it emerged that a lone Metrodome technician had, at his own initiative, tried to influence games on the Twins behalf by adjusting the air conditioning fans while the Twins were at bat. It remains unclear whether this had any effect on game play, or in particular, on games played at the Metrodome during the 1987 World Series.\n\nIn a February 2015 interview, sportscaster and author Al Michaels (who, as previously mentioned, did play-by-play for ABC's television coverage of the 1987 World Series) alleged the Twins pumped artificial crowd noise into the Metrodome during the 1987 World Series. Responding to Michaels' theory, Twins President Dave St. Peter said that he did not think the Twins needed \"conspiracy theories\" in order to win the World Series. Instead, he argued that \"appreciation and respect\" should be paid to players like Frank Viola, Gary Gaetti, Kent Hrbek, and Kirby Puckett, who, he said, \"came out of nowhere to win a championship.\"\n\nThe 1987 World Series was the final one that ABC aired that went the full seven games. The next time that ABC broadcast a World Series in 1989, the Oakland Athletics swept the San Francisco Giants in four games. For the final World Series that ABC would broadcast to date, 1995, they split the coverage with NBC. ABC only covered Games 1, 4-5 and a seventh game had it been necessary.\n\nNotes\n\nSee also\n1987 Japan Series\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n Sweet Music at SI.com \n 1987 St. Louis Cardinals at baseballlibrary.com\n 1987 Minnesota Twins at baseballlibrary.com\n A set of 10 play-by-play audio clips from ABC's coverage of the series\n Pictorial 1987 Minnesota Twins Roster\n\nWorld Series\nWorld Series\nMinnesota Twins postseason\nSt. Louis Cardinals postseason\nWorld Series\nWorld Series\n1980s in Minneapolis\n1980s in St. Louis\nOctober 1987 sports events in the United States\nSports competitions in Minneapolis\nSports competitions in St. Louis",
"This is a list of seasons completed by the Minnesota Twins, originally known as the Washington Senators, a professional baseball franchise based in Minneapolis, Minnesota; they currently play in the American League (AL) Central division.\n\nThe Minnesota Twins franchise has won three World Series in 1924, 1987 and 1991, the first of which occurred when the team was in Washington D.C. As the Senators, the team were annual doormats for the AL except 1924-1933 when the team played in three World Series (winning one). The team enjoyed success in their early years in Minnesota, reaching the World Series in 1965 and playing in two American League Championship Series with stars (and future Hall of Famers) like Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, Tony Oliva, and Jim Kaat on the roster. From 1971 to 1986, the Twins failed to reach the postseason as their stars either retired, were traded, or fled via Free Agency. The Twins had eight straight losing seasons from 1993 to 2000 and the team was a frequent target for rumored MLB contraction, but this was followed by one of the franchise's most consistent periods of success when the team only had one losing season (2007) between 2001 and 2010. Despite the team's success during this period, the Twins failed to reach another World Series. The team has been up and down since 2010; epitomized with the franchise losing 103 games in 2016, and winning 101 games (and reaching the playoffs) in 2019.\n\nRegular season record-by-year\n\nRecord by decade \nThe following table describes the Twins' MLB win–loss record by decade.\n\nThese statistics are from Baseball-Reference.com's Minnesota Twins History & Encyclopedia, and are current as of October 7, 2021.\n\nPostseason record by year\nThe Twins have made the postseason seventeen times in their history, with their first being in 1924 and the most recent being in 2020.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Twins Year-By-Year Results at MLB.com\n Twins Postseason Results at MLB.com\n\nMinnesota Twins\nSeasons"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI",
"Did the Twins win their first world series?",
"Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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What was the final score of Pucketts firstt world series
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What was the final score of Kirby Puckett first World Series?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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85-77
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
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"Blackford Bridge, also known as Pucketts Hole Bridge, is a historic Pratt through truss bridge located near Lebanon, Russell County, Virginia. It was built by the Groton Bridge Company in 1889. It crosses the Clinch River and is a two-span bridge, measuring over long.\n\nThe bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2010.\n\nSee also\nList of bridges on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia\n\nReferences\n\nRoad bridges in Virginia\nRoad bridges on the National Register of Historic Places in Virginia\nBridges completed in 1889\nBuildings and structures in Russell County, Virginia\nNational Register of Historic Places in Russell County, Virginia\nPratt truss bridges in the United States\nMetal bridges in the United States",
"The men's ISSF 25 meter rapid fire pistol was one of the thirteen shooting events at the 1992 Summer Olympics. It was the first Olympic rapid fire competition on the new, circular targets, and also the only one in history to feature both a semifinal, consisting of four four-second series for the top eight shooters, and a final, consisting of two additional four-second series for the top four. Afanasijs Kuzmins (for the first time competing for independent Latvia) and Ralf Schumann, who had battled for the gold medal four years earlier, once again clinched the top two spots, although in reversed order. The two were the eighth and ninth men to win multiple medals in the event. Schumann's win was the first victory (and first medal) for unified Germany since 1936, though East Germany (including Schumann himself) had won medals since. Kuzmins earned Latvia's first independent medal (the country had competed in 1936 before being incorporated into the Soviet Union). Vladimir Vokhmyanin of the Unified Team finished on the same score as Kuzmins, but a lower final score demoted him to bronze. There were 30 competitors from 23 nations. Nations had been limited to two shooters each since the 1952 Games.\n\nBackground\n\nThis was the 19th appearance of what had been standardised in 1948 as the men's ISSF 25 meter rapid fire pistol event, the only event on the 2020 programme that traces back to 1896. The event has been held at every Summer Olympics except 1904 and 1928 (when no shooting events were held) and 1908; it was open to women from 1968 to 1980. The first five events were quite different, with some level of consistency finally beginning with the 1932 event—which, though it had differences from the 1924 competition, was roughly similar. The 1936 competition followed the 1932 one quite closely. The post-World War II event substantially altered the competition once again. The 1984 Games introduced women's-only shooting events, including the ISSF 25 meter pistol (though this is more similar to the non-Olympic men's ISSF 25 meter center-fire pistol than the rapid fire pistol).\n\nFive of the eight finalists from 1988 returned: gold medalist (and 1980 top-10 finisher) Afanasijs Kuzmins of the Soviet Union (now competing for Latvia), silver medalist Ralf Schumann of East Germany (now competing for unified Germany), fifth-place finisher Adam Kaczmarek of Poland, sixth-place finisher Bernardo Tobar of Colombia, and seventh-place finisher John McNally of the United States. Schumann was the reigning (1990) world champion; Miroslav Ignatiuk of the Unified Team had finished second and Petri Eteläniemi of Finland third.\n\nAlbania made its debut in the event; some former Soviet republics competed as the Unified Team. The United States made its 16th appearance, most of any nation.\n\nCompetition format\n\nThe competition format used a three-round tournament for the only time, using a qualifying round, semifinal, and a final.\n\nThe qualifying round from 1988 onward was essentially the same as the full competition format from 1948–1984. Each shooter fired 60 shots. These were done in two courses of 30; each course consisted of two stages of 15; each stage consisted of three series of 5. In each stage, the time limit for each series was 8 seconds for the first, 6 seconds for the second, and 4 seconds for the third. \n\nThe 1988 tournament had added a two-series final for the top eight shooters; the 1992 competition broke that down to a four-series semifinal for the top eight and two-series final for the top four. \n\nEight shooters advanced to the semifinal. There, they shot four series of 5 shots each, all at 4 seconds. The semifinal score was added to the qualifying round score to give the semifinal total. The top four shooters by semifinal total advanced again to the final. There, they shot two more series of 5 shots each, again at 4 seconds, adding that score to their qualifying and semifinal rounds to give a final total. The finalists fired a total of 90 shots across the three rounds, with a maximum score of 900.\n\nThe 1992 competition introduced round targets rather than the silhouettes used from 1948 to 1988 as well as many pre-World War II versions of the event. Score, rather than hits, had been used as the primary ranking method since 1960.\n\nRecords\n\nThe Official Report lists Schumann's 594 in the qualifying round as a new Olympic record, suggesting that the 598 shot by Kuzmins in 1988 was considered a different format (after the change in targets from silhouettes to round targets). The 70-shot qualifying plus final used in 1988 was not used in 1992; the 80-shot qualifying plus final and 90-shot three-round score used in 1992 were not used again.\n\nSchedule\n\nResults\n\nQualifying\n\nSemifinal\n\nFinal\n\nKuzmins prevailed over Vokhmyanin due to the final scores tie-breaker (97 to 96).\n\nReferences\n\nSources\n\nShooting at the 1992 Summer Olympics\nMen's 1992\nMen's events at the 1992 Summer Olympics"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI",
"Did the Twins win their first world series?",
"Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,",
"What was the final score of Pucketts firstt world series",
"85-77"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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how many games did they win in that series
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How many games did the Twins win in the 1987 World Series?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
| false |
[
"The Serbian Hockey League Season for 1995-1996 was the fifth season of the league. Four teams participated, each one playing four games with one another, resulting in twelve games for each team. KHK Crvenza Zvezda won all the games that it played that season, resulting in them winning the regular division. They went on to win the playoffs.\n\nTeams\nHK Partizan\nKHK Crvena Zvezda\nHK Vojvodina\nHK Spartak Subotica\n\nRegular season standings\n\nPlayoffs\n\nSemifinals\nCrvena Zvezda defeated Spartak in a series. 13-1 5-0\nHK Vojvodina defeated Partizan in a series. 6-3 8-3\n\nFinals\nRed Star swept Vojvodina in the finals.\nGame 1 - 4-2\nGame 2 - 7-4\nGame 3 - 12-2\n\nthird place\nSpartak and Partizan were supposed to pay in the finals. However they did not participate, and spartak won by default.\n\ncup competition\nThere was also the competition for the cup. In it Red Star beat Vojvodina 9-3 to win it.\n\nSerbian Hockey League\nSerbian Hockey League seasons\nSerb",
"The Philippines national basketball team in 2014 led by head coach Chot Reyes first tournament was the 2014 FIBA Asia Cup where they managed to finish third. The team had a series training camps in Miami in the United States, in Antibes, France where they participated in a pocket tournament, and Spain the host country of the FIBA World Cup. They returned to the FIBA World Cup after 36 years last participating in the 1978 edition. The national team did not get past the group stage with only a lone win against Senegal. The win against Senegal was the Philippines first win at the FIBA World Cup since 1974. However the national team did not meet expectations at the Asian Games and failed to reach the medal round. Head Chot Reyes is later replaced by Tab Baldwin who assumed Reyes' former post the next year.\n\nRecord\n\nUniforms\n\nTournaments\n\nFIBA Asia Cup\n\nGroup Stage\n\nQuarterfinals\n\nSemifinals\n\n3rd place\n\nAntibes International Basketball Tournament\n\nFIBA World Cup\n\nGroup Stage\n\nAsian Games\n\nGroup Stage\n\nQuarterfinals - Group H\n\nClassification Round\n\nExhibition games\n\nReferences\n\nPhilippines men's national basketball team results\n2014–15 in Philippine basketball\n2013–14 in Philippine basketball"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI",
"Did the Twins win their first world series?",
"Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,",
"What was the final score of Pucketts firstt world series",
"85-77",
"how many games did they win in that series",
"a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
|
So does that mean they won three games in their first world series title?
| 6 |
Did the Twins win three games in the 1987 World Series?
|
Kirby Puckett
|
In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
|
Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West,
|
Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
| false |
[
"The San Francisco Giants are a professional baseball team based in San Francisco, California. They have been a member of the National League (NL), as a part of Major League Baseball, since the team's inception in 1883. They joined the NL West following the establishment of divisions within the league in 1969. The Giants played 75 seasons in New York City, New York, as the New York Gothams and New York Giants, spending the majority of their seasons at the Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan. The Giants relocated to San Francisco in 1958, briefly playing at Seals Stadium. After sharing Candlestick Park for 29 years with the San Francisco 49ers National Football League team, the Giants moved to their current home, Oracle Park, in 2000. From October 1, 2010 through June 16, 2017, the Giants recorded a National League-record 530 consecutive sellouts.\n\nThe Giants are one of the most successful teams in Major League Baseball history, having won more games than any other team and having the second highest winning percentage. In New York, the Giants enjoyed 55 winning seasons, with only 3 losing seasons between 1903 and 1939, a stretch which included two runs of 10 or more straight winning seasons (1903-14 and 1916-1925). In San Francisco the Giants have had 39 winning seasons, including their first fourteen in the city. Their eight World Series titles are tied for fourth-most in baseball, while their 23 pennants are the second most in the National League, and second-most overall. Their first title came in 1905 against the Philadelphia Athletics, where they won the series 4–1. They claimed four consecutive National League pennants between 1921 and 1924, going on to beat cross-town team the New York Yankees in the World Series on two of those occasions. Their fourth title came in 1933 as they beat the Washington Senators in five games. The 1951 season saw the Giants beat their rivals the Brooklyn Dodgers in a three-game playoff for the National League pennant. The Giants won the series 2–1 on a walk-off home run by Bobby Thomson in game 3, a moment remembered as the Shot Heard 'Round the World. They went on to lose in the World Series to the Yankees. A 4–0 series sweep of the Cleveland Indians in the 1954 World Series earned the Giants their fifth title.\n\nUntil 2010, the Giants were without a title since relocation to San Francisco — at the time this was the third-longest World Series winning drought in the league. They have made it to the World Series on six occasions following the move, but were on the losing side each of the first three times. Among those was the 1989 World Series, when the \"Bay Bridge Series\", being contested against neighboring team the Oakland Athletics, was interrupted by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; the series was postponed for ten days, and the Giants were eventually swept by the A's. The club ended its title-winning drought in 2010, as they beat the Texas Rangers 4–1 to bring the Commissioner's Trophy to San Francisco for the first time in the city's history. The Giants won their second title in San Francisco in 2012, sweeping the Detroit Tigers, and won again for the third time in five years in 2014, defeating the Kansas City Royals in seven games.\n\nIn their entire history (138 years), the Giants have never had more than four straight losing seasons, and have never finished at .500, either finishing above or below that mark every year.\n\nYear by year results\n\nRecord by decade \nThe following table describes the Giants' MLB win–loss record by decade.\n\nThese statistics are from Baseball-Reference.com's San Francisco Giants History & Encyclopedia, and are current as of October, 4th 2021.\n\nAll-time records\n\nNote: These statistics are current as of October 14, 2021.\n\nNotes\n The Giants were due to play against the Boston Americans, champions of the American League, but boycotted the series. John McGraw, then Giants manager, claimed the AL was inferior and any series would be unnecessary.\n Does not include postseason games prior to 1903 — the beginning of the modern World Series era — as these were considered exhibition games.\n\nReferences\nGeneral\n\nSpecific\n\nExternal links\nSan Francisco Giants History\n\n \nSan Francisco Giants\nSeasons",
"The Milwaukee Brewers Major League Baseball (MLB) franchise of the National League (NL) has played in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, since 1970. The team was established in 1969 as the Seattle Pilots in Seattle, Washington, and they became the Brewers after relocating to Wisconsin in 1970. The franchise played in the American League (AL) until 1998 when it moved to the National League in conjunction with a major league realignment. As of the completion of the 2021 season, the Brewers have played 8,352 regular season games and compiled a win–loss record of 4,037–4,315 (). They have qualified for the postseason eight times and have a postseason record of . Combining all 8,401 regular season and postseason games, the team has an all-time record of 4,058–4,343 ().\n\nThe franchise posted losing records each of their first nine seasons. Their first winning season occurred in 1978 when they finished at 93–69 (.574). Three years later, the Brewers qualified for their first MLB postseason by winning the second half 1981 AL East Division title in a season which had been shortened by the 1981 Major League Baseball strike. They lost the American League Division Series to the New York Yankees, three games to two. The following year, Milwaukee won the AL East title and then the 1982 American League Championship Series versus the California Angels, three games to two. In that year's World Series, the Brewers faced the National League Champion St. Louis Cardinals. The series went to a decisive game seven and resulted in a Brewers World Series loss. \n\nThe team soon began a 25-year postseason drought that stood as the third-longest in the expanded-postseason era. Milwaukee returned to the playoffs in 2008 by winning the National League Wild Card. The Brewers lost the National League Division Series (NLDS) to the Philadelphia Phillies, three games to one. They won the 2011 NL Central Division title and defeated the Arizona Diamondbacks, three games to two, in the NLDS. Their postseason run was ended by the St. Louis Cardinals, who won the National League Championship Series (NLCS), four games to two.\n\nIn 2018, Milwaukee finished the regular season tied with the Chicago Cubs for first place in the NL Central. The Brewers defeated the Cubs in a tie-breaker game, 3–1, securing the division title and relegating Chicago to the wild card game. Milwaukee then swept the Colorado Rockies in the best-of-five NLDS, advancing to the NLCS, where they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers, four games to three. The following year, they secured one of two NL wild card berths but lost the 2019 National League Wild Card Game to the Washington Nationals, 4–3. The Brewers won another wild card spot in the 2020 season, which had been shortened due to the COVID-19 pandemic. They lost the 2020 NL Wild Card Series versus the Los Angeles Dodgers, two games to zero. Milwaukee won the 2021 NL Central Division title but lost the NLDS versus the Atlanta Braves, 3–1.\n\nThe Brewers' best season record occurred in 2011 when they finished 96–66 (.593). Conversely, their lowest season record was 56–106 (.346) in 2002.\n\nTable key\n\nSeason-by-season records\n\nPostseason records\nThe Brewers have made the postseason eight times in their history, with the first being in 1981 and the most recent being in 2021.\n\nFranchise totals\n\nNotes\n\nReferences\nSpecific\n\nGeneral\n\n \nMajor League Baseball teams seasons\nSeasons"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI",
"Did the Twins win their first world series?",
"Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,",
"What was the final score of Pucketts firstt world series",
"85-77",
"how many games did they win in that series",
"a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East",
"So does that mean they won three games in their first world series title?",
"Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West,"
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
|
I think there are 7 games in the world series itself. How many did they win during puckets first world series
| 7 |
IHow many games did the Twins win in the 1987 World Series?
|
Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons.
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
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[
"Hexcells is a puzzle video game series developed and published by British designer Matthew Brown. There are three games in the series: Hexcells, Hexcells Plus, and Hexcells Infinite.\n\nGameplay \nThe gameplay of each installment in Hexcells is similar to Minesweeper. Each level contains a grid of hexagonal orange tiles. Under each tile hides a shape that is coloured either blue or black. The player left-clicks a tile if they think it is blue and right-clicks if they think it is black. Each black tile and some blue tiles display a number which represents how many blue tiles it is bordering. The objective of each level is to locate all of the blue tiles with the fewest mistakes.\n\nAt the top of each row, column and diagonal in each level there is a number which displays how many blue tiles there are in that section. These numbers, as well as the numbers inside the blue or black tiles, may have symbols surrounding them: curly brackets () show that the neighbouring blue shapes are conjoined, and hyphens () show that they are not.\n\nEach game contains six \"worlds\" of 36 levels, and Hexcells Infinite contains an extra \"infinite\" mode with procedurally generated levels.\n\nThe art style is minimalistic and has a contrast between the orange and blue tiles.\n\nDevelopment \nHexcells was in development throughout 2013. Hexcells and Hexcells Plus were released on 20 February 2014, and Hexcells Infinite was released on 1 September 2014.\n\nReception \nThe games have been commonly compared to Minesweeper. They were praised for their simplistic art style and contrastive colours. One stated negative was that there was no punishment for making mistakes.\n\nHexcells Infinite was rated 80/100 by New Game Network, who described it as \"a unique idea based around the age old concepts of logic\". Rock Paper Shotgun described the game as a \"ludicrous pleasure to play\".\n\nSee also \n SquareCells\n\nReferences \n\n2014 video games\nIOS games\nLinux games\nMacOS games\nPuzzle video games\nVideo games developed in the United Kingdom\nWindows games",
"Follow Me! is a series of television programmes produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and the BBC in the late 1970s to provide a crash course in the English language. It became popular in many overseas countries as a first introduction to English; in 1983, one hundred million people watched the show in China alone, featuring Kathy Flower.\n\nThe British actor Francis Matthews hosted and narrated the series.\n\nThe course consists of sixty lessons. Each lesson lasts from 12 to 15 minutes and covers a specific lexis. The lessons follow a consistent group of actors, with the relationships between their characters developing during the course.\n\nFollow Me! actors\n Francis Matthews\n Raymond Mason\n David Savile\n Ian Bamforth\n Keith Alexander\n Diane Mercer\n Jane Argyle\n Diana King\n Veronica Leigh\n Elaine Wells\n Danielle Cohn\n Lashawnda Bell\n\nEpisodes \n \"What's your name\"\n \"How are you\"\n \"Can you help me\"\n \"Left, right, straight ahead\"\n \"Where are they\"\n \"What's the time\"\n \"What's this What's that\"\n \"I like it very much\"\n \"Have you got any wine\"\n \"What are they doing\"\n \"Can I have your name, please\"\n \"What does she look like\"\n \"No smoking\"\n \"It's on the first floor\"\n \"Where's he gone\"\n \"Going away\"\n \"Buying things\"\n \"Why do you like it\"\n \"What do you need\"\n \"I sometimes work late\"\n \"Welcome to Britain\"\n \"Who's that\"\n \"What would you like to do\"\n \"How can I get there?\"\n \"Where is it\"\n \"What's the date\"\n \"Whose is it\"\n \"I enjoy it\"\n \"How many and how much\"\n \"What have you done\"\n \"Haven't we met before\"\n \"What did you say\"\n \"Please stop\"\n \"How can I get to Brightly\"\n \"Where can I get it\"\n \"There's a concert on Wednesday\"\n \"What's it like\"\n \"What do you think of him\"\n \"I need someone\"\n \"What were you doing\"\n \"What do you do\"\n \"What do you know about him\"\n \"You shouldn't do that\"\n \"I hope you enjoy your holiday\"\n \"Where can I see a football match\"\n \"When will it be ready\"\n \"Where did you go\"\n \"I think it's awful\"\n \"A room with a view\"\n \"You'll be ill\"\n \"I don't believe in strikes\"\n \"They look tired\"\n \"Would you like to\"\n \"Holiday plans\"\n \"The second shelf on the left\"\n \"When you are ready\"\n \"Tell them about Britain\"\n \"I liked everything\"\n \"Classical or modern\"\n \"Finale\"\n\nReferences \n\n BBC article about the series in China\n\nExternal links \n Follow Me – Beginner level \n Follow Me – Elementary level\n Follow Me – Intermediate level\n Follow Me – Advanced level\n\nAdult education television series\nEnglish-language education television programming"
] |
[
"Kirby Puckett",
"1987-1990 (First World Series title)",
"when was kirby Pucketts First world Series",
"Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series,",
"What position did he play in outfield",
"Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI",
"Did the Twins win their first world series?",
"Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers,",
"What was the final score of Pucketts firstt world series",
"85-77",
"how many games did they win in that series",
"a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East",
"So does that mean they won three games in their first world series title?",
"Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West,",
"I think there are 7 games in the world series itself. How many did they win during puckets first world series",
"becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons."
] |
C_be076763e9f04255825835a9500638a7_1
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Did Pucket win any awards during his first world series
| 8 |
Did Kirby Puckett win any awards during during the 1987 World Series?
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Kirby Puckett
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In 1987, the Twins reached the post-season for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77 (a mark that would have put them 4 games behind fourth place New York in the American League East). Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357. During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth. Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team would finish a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics. Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped further, going 80-82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74-88. CANNOTANSWER
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fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons.
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Kirby Puckett (March 14, 1960 – March 6, 2006) was an American professional baseball player. He played his entire 12-year Major League Baseball (MLB) career as a center fielder for the Minnesota Twins (1984–1995). Puckett is the Twins' all-time leader in career hits, runs, and total bases. At the time of his retirement, his .318 career batting average was the highest by any right-handed American League batter since Joe DiMaggio.
Puckett was the fourth baseball player during the 20th century to record 1,000 hits in his first five full calendar years in Major League Baseball, and was the second to record 2,000 hits during his first ten full calendar years. After being forced to retire in 1996 at age 36 due to loss of vision in one eye from a central retinal vein occlusion, Puckett was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001, his first year of eligibility.
Early life
Puckett was born in Chicago, Illinois, and he was raised in Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project on Chicago's South Side (the escape from which he frequently referred to during his career). He played baseball for Calumet High School. After receiving no scholarship offers following graduation, Puckett went to work on an assembly line for Ford Motor Company. However, he was given a chance to attend Bradley University and after one year transferred to Triton College. Despite his frame, the Minnesota Twins selected him in the first round (third pick) of the 1982 Major League Baseball January Draft-Regular Phase.
After signing with the team, he went to the rookie-league Elizabethton Twins in the Appalachian League, hitting .382, with 3 home runs, 35 RBI, and 43 steals in 65 games. In 1983, Puckett was promoted to the Single-A Visalia Oaks in the California League, where he hit .318 with nine home runs, 97 RBI, and 48 stolen bases over 138 games. After being promoted to the AAA Toledo Mud Hens to start the 1984 season, Puckett was brought up to the majors for good 21 games into the season.
MLB career
Puckett's major league debut came on May 8, 1984, against the California Angels, a game in which he went 4-for-5 with one run. That year, Puckett hit .296 and was fourth in the American League in singles. In 1985, Puckett hit .288 and finished fourth in the league in hits, third in triples, second in plate appearances, and first in at bats. Throughout his career, Puckett would routinely appear in the top 10 in the American League in such offensive statistical categories as games played, at bats, singles, doubles, and total bases and such defensive stats as putouts, assists, and fielding percentage for league center fielders.
In 1986, Puckett began to emerge as more than just a singles hitter. With an average of .328, Puckett was elected to his first Major League Baseball All-Star Game and he finished the season seventh in doubles, sixth in home runs, fourth in extra-base hits, third in slugging percentage, and second in runs scored, hits, total bases, and at-bats. Kirby was also recognized for his defensive skills, earning his first Gold Glove Award.
1987–1990 (First World Series title)
In 1987, the Twins reached the postseason for the first time since 1970 despite finishing with a mark of 85-77. Once there, Puckett helped lead the Twins to the 1987 World Series, the Twins' second series appearance since relocating to Minnesota and fifth in franchise history. For the season, Puckett batted .332 with 28 home runs and 99 RBI Although he hit only .208 in the Twins' five game AL Championship Series win over the Detroit Tigers, Puckett would produce in the seven-game World Series upset over the St. Louis Cardinals, where he batted .357.
During the year, Puckett put on his best performance on August 30 in Milwaukee against the Brewers, when he went 6-for-6 with two home runs, one off Juan Nieves in the third and the other off closer Dan Plesac in the ninth.
Statistically speaking, Puckett had his best all-around season in 1988, hitting .356 with 24 home runs and 121 RBI, finishing third in the AL MVP balloting for the second straight season. Although the Twins won 91 games, six more than in their championship season, the team finished a distant second in the American League West, 13 games behind the Oakland Athletics.
Puckett won the AL batting title in 1989 with a mark of .339, while also finishing fifth in at-bats, second in doubles, first in hits, and second in singles. The Twins, two years removed from the championship season, slumped, going 80–82 and ended in fifth place, 19 games behind the Athletics. In April 1989, he recorded his 1,000th hit, becoming the fourth player in Major League Baseball history to do so in his first five seasons. He continued to play well in 1990, but had a down season, finishing with a .298 batting average, and the Twins mirrored his performance as the team slipped all the way to last place in the AL West with a record of 74–88.
1991–1995 (Second World Series title)
In 1991, the Twins got back on the winning track and Puckett led the way by batting .319, eighth in the league and Minnesota surged past Oakland midseason to capture the division title. The Twins then beat the Toronto Blue Jays in five games in the American League Championship Series as Puckett batted .429 with two home runs and five RBI to win the ALCS MVP.
The subsequent 1991 World Series was ranked by ESPN to be the best ever played, with four games decided on the final pitch and three games going into extra innings. The Twins and their opponent, the Atlanta Braves, had each finished last in their respective divisions in the year before winning their league pennant, something that had never happened before.
Going into Game 6, the Twins trailed three games to two with each team winning their respective home games. Puckett gave the Twins an early lead by driving in Chuck Knoblauch with a triple in the first inning. Puckett then made a leaping catch in front of the Plexiglass wall in left field to rob Ron Gant of an extra-base hit in the third. The game went into extra innings, and in the first at-bat of the bottom of the 11th, Puckett hit a dramatic game-winning home run on a 2–1 count off of Charlie Leibrandt to send the Series to Game 7. This dramatic game has been widely remembered as the high point in Puckett's career. The images of Puckett rounding the bases, arms raised in triumph (often punctuated by CBS television broadcaster Jack Buck saying "And we'll see you tomorrow night!"), are frequently included in video highlights of his career. After Game 6, the Twins replaced the blue seat back and bottom where the walk-off home run ball was caught with a gold-colored set. Both of these sets remain in the Twins' archives. The original home run seat armrests and hardware, as well as the replacement blue seat back and bottom, are now in a private collection of Puckett memorabilia in Minnesota after the Metrodome was torn down. The Twins then went on to win Game 7 1–0, with Jack Morris throwing a 10-inning complete game, and claimed their second World Series crown in five years.
Though the Twins didn't make it to the postseason for the rest of Puckett's career, he remained an elite player. In 1994, Puckett was switched to right field and won his first league RBI title by driving in 112 runs in only 108 games; a pace that projects to 168 RBIs over a full season. But the 1994 season was cut short by a players' strike.
The next year, Puckett was posting a typically brilliant 1995 season before having his jaw broken in his final career at-bat by a Dennis Martínez fastball on September 28.
Retirement
After spending the spring of 1996 continuing to blister Grapefruit League batting with a .344 average, Puckett woke up on March 28 without vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with glaucoma, and was placed on the disabled list for the first time in his professional career. Three surgeries over the next few months could not restore vision in the eye. When it was apparent that he would never be able to play again, Puckett announced his retirement on July 12, 1996, at the age of 36. Soon after, the Twins made him an executive vice-president of the team and he would also receive the 1996 Roberto Clemente Award for community service.
The Twins retired Puckett's number 34 in 1997. In 2001 balloting, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility. In 1999, he ranked Number 86 on The Sporting News list of the 100 Greatest Baseball Players.
Puckett was admired throughout his career. His unquestionable baseball prowess, outgoing personality and energy, charity work, community involvement, and attitude earned him the respect and admiration of fans across the country. In 1993, he received the Branch Rickey Award for his lifetime of community service work.
Legal issues
Following his retirement, Puckett's reputation was damaged by a number of incidents. In March 2002, a woman filed for an order of protection against Puckett's wife, Tonya Puckett, claiming that Tonya had threatened to kill her over an alleged affair with Puckett. Later that same month, another woman asked for protection from Puckett himself, claiming in court documents that he had shoved her in his Bloomington condominium during the course of an 18-year relationship. In September 2002, Puckett was accused of groping a woman in a restaurant bathroom and was charged with false imprisonment, fifth-degree criminal sexual conduct, and fifth-degree assault. He was found not guilty of all counts.
In the March 17, 2003, edition of Sports Illustrated, columnist George Dohrmann wrote an article titled "The Rise and Fall of Kirby Puckett". The article documented Puckett's alleged indiscretions and contrasted his private image with the much-revered public image he had previously maintained. Specifically, the article stated that Puckett had extramarital relationships with several women and that a female Minnesota Twins employee had obtained a financial settlement following a claim that Puckett had sexually harassed her. The article added Tonya Puckett had called police on December 21, 2001, to report that Puckett had threatened to kill her. Withdrawing from the Twins organization and from friends, Puckett moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in the winter of 2003 with his fiancée, Jodi Olson, and her son Cameron. Those who did see him became concerned about Puckett's weight, with estimates putting it above 300 pounds. However, there was also optimism with news that Puckett planned to marry Olson in June 2005.
Death and legacy
On the morning of March 5, 2006, Puckett suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke at the home he shared with Olson. He underwent emergency surgery that day to relieve pressure on his brain; however, the surgery failed, and his former teammates and coaches were notified the following morning that the end was near. Many, including 1991 teammates Shane Mack and Kent Hrbek, flew to Phoenix to be at his bedside during his final hours along with his two children Kirby Jr. and Catherine. His fiancée never left his side. Puckett died on March 6, just eight days from his 46th birthday, shortly after being disconnected from life support.
In the subsequent autopsy, the official cause of death was recorded as "cerebral hemorrhage due to hypertension." Puckett died at the second-youngest age (behind Lou Gehrig) of any Hall of Famer inducted while living, and the youngest to die after being inducted in the modern era of the five-season waiting period. Puckett was survived by his son Kirby Jr. and daughter Catherine.
A private memorial service was held in the Twin Cities suburb of Wayzata on the afternoon of March 12 (declared "Kirby Puckett Day" in Minneapolis), followed by a public ceremony held at the Metrodome attended by family, friends, ballplayers past and present, and approximately 15,000 fans (an anticipated capacity crowd dwindled through the day due to an impending blizzard). Speakers at the latter service included Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Cal Ripken, Jr. and Dave Winfield, and many former teammates and coaches.
On April 12, 2010, a statue of Puckett was unveiled at the plaza of Target Field in Minneapolis. The plaza runs up against the stadium's largest gate, Gate 34, numbered in honor of Puckett. The statue represents Puckett pumping his fist while running the bases, as he did after his winning home run in Game 6 of the 1991 World Series.
At the time of his own retirement in 2016, longtime Boston Red Sox first baseman/designated hitter David Ortiz stated that he had used uniform number 34 with the Red Sox to honor Puckett's friendship with him. Ortiz began his MLB career with the Twins.
See also
DHL Hometown Heroes
List of Major League Baseball annual runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball batting champions
List of Major League Baseball career doubles leaders
List of Major League Baseball career hits leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs batted in leaders
List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
List of Major League Baseball hit records
List of Major League Baseball players to hit for the cycle
List of Major League Baseball players who spent their entire career with one franchise
List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
Major League Baseball titles leaders
References
Further reading
A children's picture-book autobiography, Be the Best You Can Be (), published by Waldman House Press in 1993;
An autobiography, I Love This Game: My Life and Baseball (), published by HarperCollins in 1993; and
A book of baseball games and drills, Kirby Puckett's Baseball Games (), published by Workman Publishing Company in 1996
External links
Baseball's 100 Greatest Players (#86) The Sporting News
Official Major League Baseball tribute site
SABR BioProject: Kirby Puckett
Obituary in the Star Tribune
1960 births
2006 deaths
African-American baseball players
American League All-Stars
American League batting champions
American League Championship Series MVPs
American League RBI champions
Baseball players from Chicago
Bradley Braves baseball players
Deaths from cerebrovascular disease
Elizabethton Twins players
Gold Glove Award winners
Major League Baseball All-Star Game MVPs
Major League Baseball broadcasters
Major League Baseball center fielders
Major League Baseball players with retired numbers
Minnesota Twins players
National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees
People acquitted of sex crimes
Silver Slugger Award winners
Baseball players from Minneapolis
Baseball players from Scottsdale, Arizona
Toledo Mud Hens players
Triton College alumni
Triton Trojans baseball players
Visalia Oaks players
20th-century African-American sportspeople
21st-century African-American people
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"Donald Dale Pucket (December 15, 1915 – July 9, 1944) was a United States Army Air Forces officer and a recipient of the United States military's highest decoration—the Medal of Honor—for his actions in World War II.\n\nBiography\nPucket joined the Army from Boulder, Colorado in 1942, and by July 9, 1944 was a first lieutenant piloting bombers with the 98th Bombardment Group. During a raid that day over Ploieşti, Romania, his airplane was badly damaged by anti-aircraft fire. He ordered his crew to abandon the craft, but three men were too frightened to parachute out. Pucket voluntarily stayed behind with the men and tried unsuccessfully to regain control of the plane. The aircraft crashed into a mountainside, killing all on board. Pucket was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor a year later, on June 23, 1945.\n\nAged 28 at his death, Pucket was buried at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Saint Louis, Missouri.\n\nAwards and decorations\nIn addition to the Medal of Honor, Pucket also received the Distinguished Flying Cross, three Air Medals, and the Purple Heart.\n\nMedal of Honor citation\nFirst Lieutenant Pucket's official Medal of Honor citation reads:\nHe took part in a highly effective attack against vital oil installation in Ploesti, Rumania, on 9 July 1944. Just after \"bombs away,\" the plane received heavy and direct hits from antiaircraft fire. One crewmember was instantly killed and 6 others severely wounded. The airplane was badly damaged, 2 were knocked out, the control cables cut, the oxygen system on fire, and the bomb bay flooded with gas and hydraulic fluid. Regaining control of his crippled plane, 1st Lt. Pucket turned its direction over to the copilot. He calmed the crew, administered first aid, and surveyed the damage. Finding the bomb bay doors jammed, he used the hand crank to open them to allow the gas to escape. He jettisoned all guns and equipment but the plane continued to lose altitude rapidly. Realizing that it would be impossible to reach friendly territory he ordered the crew to abandon ship. Three of the crew, uncontrollable from fright or shock, would not leave. 1st Lt. Pucket urged the others to jump. Ignoring their entreaties to follow, he refused to abandon the 3 hysterical men and was last seen fighting to regain control of the plane. A few moments later the flaming bomber crashed on a mountainside. 1st Lt. Pucket, unhesitatingly and with supreme sacrifice, gave his life in his courageous attempt to save the lives of 3 others.\n\nSee also\n\n List of Medal of Honor recipients for World War II\n\nReferences\n\n1915 births\n1944 deaths\nPeople from Boulder, Colorado\nUnited States Army Air Forces officers\nUnited States Army Air Forces pilots of World War II\nUnited States Army Air Forces personnel killed in World War II\nUnited States Army Air Forces Medal of Honor recipients\nRecipients of the Distinguished Flying Cross (United States)\nRecipients of the Air Medal\nWorld War II recipients of the Medal of Honor\nAviators killed by being shot down\nAviators killed in aviation accidents or incidents in Romania\nMilitary personnel from Colorado",
"Mark Tatulli is an American cartoonist, writer, animator and television producer, known for his strips Liō and Heart of the City and for his work on the cable reality television series Trading Spaces and A Wedding Story, for which he has won three Emmy Awards. His comics have appeared in hundreds of newspapers around the world.\n\nTatulli grew up in Willingboro Township, New Jersey and started drawing in his youth, publishing his first cartoons in the pages of the Burlington County Times. A resident of Washington Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey, Tatulli began drawing in elementary school, where his cartoons first appeared in the school's newspaper. After He became a syndicated cartoonist, a former teacher of his told him that \"I can't believe you're still doing the same crap you were doing in junior high, and now getting paid for it.\"\n\nIn a 2014 interview with L'Idea, Tatulli cited Berkeley Breathed 's Bloom County, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury and the ensemble at Mad magazine as being the cartoons that most influenced his career and style as a cartoonist.\n\nComics works\nAfter trying unsuccessfully to promote eight different strips over a decade, his first comic strip was Bent Halos, which features two angels named Harold and Mort who achieve little success in their attempted roles as guardian angels. First created in August 1994 with syndicator Lew Little Enterprises, the strip was appearing in 12 newspapers nationwide by 1996. By 2014, Tatulli said that he had no plans to bring it back for publication.\n\nHeart of the City, which debuted in November 1998, features a girl named Heart who lives in Philadelphia. The character Heart is inspired by Tatulli's daughter Lexa.\n\nLiō, which has been published since May 2006, is a \"sweetly dark\" pantomime cartoon without dialogue that was inspired by Tatulli's love of the horror movies he watched while growing up as a child in the 1970s. The title character is a \"weird little boy\" who inhabits a world occupied by aliens, monsters, robots and other strange characters. According to Tatulli, he came up with the name \"Lio\" because he \"wanted a simple name to go with the simple, wordless concept. Just three letters.\" In 2012, Tatulli released Lio: There's a Monster in My Socks, a book compiling comic strips from the first year that the cartoon was distributed, with a focus on those strips that would most appeal to children.\n\nRecognized in 2009 as \"Best Comic Strip\" by the National Cartoonists Society, his cartoons were being published in about 400 newspapers around the world by 2012. He has won three Emmy Awards for the production design he did for the cable reality television series Trading Spaces and A Wedding Story.\n\nTatulli is also the author/illustrator of the middle-grade novel series, \"Desmond Pucket\". Three books in the series were released: Desmond Pucket Makes Monster Magic (2013), Desmond Pucket and the Mountain Full of Monsters (2014/2015), and Desmond Pucket and the Cloverfield Junior High Carnival of Horrors (2016).\n\nTatulli released a biographical graphic novel, Short and Skinny in 2018. It chronicles a summer in middle school in which he was inspired by the original Star Wars (film) to make his own parody of the film, while dealing with navigating relationships with bullies, friends, parents and body image.\n\nIn late 2019 Tatulli decided to retire from drawing “Heart of the City” after 22 years because of his full plate working on \"Liō\" and \"Short and Skinny.\" Andrews McMeel Syndication began searching for a cartoonist to continue the strip, and in April 2020 announced that Detroit-based African-American cartoonist Steenz (real name Christina Stewart) would inherit the writing and drawing of “Heart of the City,” adopting a completely new artistic style and advancing characters Heart and Dean into middle school life. The last daily \"Heart of the City\" strip drawn by Tatulli was published April 25, 2020, with the last Tatulli-drawn Sunday \"Heart\" strip published May 17.\n\nFilmography\n Trading Spaces (HGTV, post producer)\n A Wedding Story (Discovery/TLC, post producer)\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n\n \n \n Tatulli, Mark. \"Heart of the City\". Universal Uclick. Universal Press Syndicate.\n\nAmerican comics artists\nPeople from Washington Township, Gloucester County, New Jersey\nPeople from Westchester County, New York\nPeople from Willingboro Township, New Jersey\n1963 births\nLiving people"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach"
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C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
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was bart the packers coach?
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was Bart Starr the packers coach?
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Bart Starr
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Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
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Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach
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Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
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"Walter Cruice (April 13, 1913 – December 7, 2001 (Indianapolis Star, December 9, 2001) was a professional American football player, assistant coach, and scout in the National Football League with the Green Bay Packers. He served as Chief Scout for 31 years under every head coach from Curly Lambeau through Bart Starr. During his time with the team, the Packers won five league championships, including the first two Super Bowls.\n\nPlaying career\nCruice played high school football at Washington High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His high school coach was future Packers' coach Lisle Blackbourn, for whom he would later serve under as Chief Scout from 1954–1957. He then played college football as a halfback at Northwestern University from 1934–1936 and was the team's co-captain and most valuable player as a senior. After his final season, he played in the East–West Shrine Game.\n\nCruice was drafted by the Packers as the 70th pick in the 1936 NFL Draft, but turned down the contract offer. Instead, he went to work for an oil company in Chicago and played for the Chicago Gunners, a regional professional team.\n\nCoaching career\nCruice began his coaching career by coaching freshman football at Northwestern in 1938 and 1939 and served as an assistant coach at Naval Station Great Lakes in 1942 and 1943. He was hired by the Packers in 1946 and worked for them through 1949. When Curly Lambeau resigned as the Packers' coach and took over the Chicago Cardinals, Cruice left with him for two seasons. Cruice returned to the Packers in 1952 under Gene Ronzani and scouted for them through the 1976 season, Bart Starr's second as head coach. Cruice also served under Scooter McLean, Vince Lombardi, Phil Bengtson and Dan Devine.\n\n1913 births\n2001 deaths\nSportspeople from Milwaukee\nAmerican football halfbacks\nGreen Bay Packers coaches\nChicago Cardinals coaches\nNorthwestern Wildcats football players\nPlayers of American football from Milwaukee",
"The 1975 Green Bay Packers season was their 57th season overall and their 55th season in the National Football League. The team finished with a 4–10 record under new coach Bart Starr, earning them a fourth-place finish in the NFC Central division. The Packers got off to an 0-4 start, but finally beat the Cowboys in Dallas for Bart Starr's first coaching win. After a 1–8 start, the Packers would end the season on a positive note winning three of their final five games to finish with a 4-10 record.\n\nOffseason\n\nNFL Draft\n\nRoster\n\nRegular season\n\nSchedule \n\nNote: Intra-division opponents are in bold text.\n\nGame summaries\n\nWeek 10 \n\n Source: Pro-Football-Reference.com\n\nWeek 11\n\nStandings\n\nAwards and records\n\nReferences \n\n Sportsencyclopedia.com\n\nGreen Bay Packers seasons\nGreen Bay Packers\nGreen"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach"
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
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how long was he their coach?
| 2 |
how long Starr was Packers' quarterbacks coach?
|
Bart Starr
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Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
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he led the Packers for nine years,
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Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| true |
[
"William C. \"Billy\" Foulds (October 8, 1887 – May 14, 1954) was a Canadian football player, coach, referee, and administrator who was the head coach of the Toronto Argonauts for three seasons. He was the Vice President of the CRU from 1933 to 1936 and was the President in 1921 and 1937. He was the Head Referee of the Big Four for a long time after his playing career was over. He died on May 14, 1954 at the age of 66. Foulds was a charter member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.\n\nEarly life\n\nPlaying career \nFoulds started his playing career with the Toronto Varsity Blues in the 1900s. He was with them when they won the 1st and 2nd Grey Cup. After 1910, he became the coach of the Toronto Argonauts following the retirement of Joe Lee. He would bring the Argonauts to the 3rd Grey Cup, but would lose to his former team, the Toronto Varsity Blues. He was their Quarterback for the next few years and became their coach again in 1914. He was the Co-Coach in 1915 along with Warren Coryell. He later became a referee and was the Head Referee of the Big Four until his death in 1954.\n\nLater career\nIn 1921 and in 1937 he was the CRU President. He was their vice president from 1933 to 1936. He was also their chairman for a long time. He was a charter member for the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1963.\n\nDeath\nFoulds died on May 14, 1954 at the age of 66 from a heart attack.\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\n1888 births\n1954 deaths\nToronto Argonauts players\nToronto Argonauts coaches\nToronto Varsity Blues football players",
"Chip Long (born May 1, 1983) is an American football coach who is currently the offensive coordinator at Georgia Tech. He previously was the offensive coordinator for Tulane, Notre Dame, and Memphis.\n\nCoaching career\n\nEarly coaching career\nLong began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at Louisville, where he held the position for two years. This was followed by two years as a graduate assistant at Arkansas. In 2010 and 2011 Long worked as Illinois' tight ends and fullbacks coach.\n\nIn 2012, Long went to Arizona State to coach the Sun Devils tight ends while also serving as the recruiting coordinator. Long followed Mike Norvell from Arizona State to Memphis Tigers to serve as offensive coordinator under Norvell in 2016.\n\nNotre Dame\nAfter one season at Memphis, Long left to become offensive coordinator for Notre Dame. Long was a finalist for the 2018 Broyles Award, which is given to the nation's top assistant coach, after the Irish finished the regular season undefeated, and had secured their first appearance in the college football playoffs.\n\nTennessee\nOn December 11, 2019, it was announced that Long would not be retained by the University of Notre Dame. In February 2020, Long accepted an off-the-field analyst position at the University of Tennessee.\n\nTulane\nOn December 8, 2020, Tulane announced the addition of Long as offensive coordinator.\n\nGeorgia Tech\nOn December 5, 2021, Georgia Tech announced Long was hired to become the new offensive coordinator for coach Geoff Collins and the Yellow Jackets. Additionally he originally was supposed to be the quarterbacks coach, but he then was transitioned to the team’s tight ends coach.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Memphis Tigers bio\n\n1983 births\nLiving people\nAmerican football tight ends\nAmerican football wide receivers\nArizona State Sun Devils football coaches\nArkansas Razorbacks football coaches\nIllinois Fighting Illini football coaches\nLouisville Cardinals football coaches\nMemphis Tigers football coaches\nNorth Alabama Lions football players\nNotre Dame Fighting Irish football coaches\nTulane Green Wave football coaches"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach",
"how long was he their coach?",
"he led the Packers for nine years,"
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
|
did he lead them to any victories?
| 3 |
did Starr lead Packers' quarterbacks to any victories?
|
Bart Starr
|
Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
|
playoff record of 1-1.
|
Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| false |
[
"The 1943 Cotton Bowl Classic was a college football bowl game played on January 1,1943 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, TX\n\nBackground\nThis was Texas's first bowl game. They were led by Dana X. Bible. This was Georgia Tech's second bowl game of what would be six in the 1940s.\n\nGame summary\nMax Minor caught a touchdown pass from Roy McKay and Jackie Field returned a punt 60 yards for a touchdown to give Texas a 14-0 lead into the fourth quarter as Bible replaced his starters.\n\nBut Georgia Tech drove 56 yards capped by a David Eldredge touchdown run to narrow the lead. Georgia Tech forced Texas to punt as Tech went on the offensive. They drove all the way to the Texas 5 yard-line, but Texas' defensive line stopped them short as Texas took over at the four. They ran out the clock as Texas won their first bowl game.\n\nAftermath\nSince this game, Texas has been to 22 more Cotton Bowl Classics and have won 11 more times, the most Cotton Bowl victories of any team. Georgia Tech did not return to the Cotton Bowl Classic until 1955.\n\nStatistics\n\nReferences\n\nCotton Bowl Classic\nCotton Bowl Classic\nGeorgia Tech Yellow Jackets football bowl games\nTexas Longhorns football bowl games\nJanuary 1943 sports events\nCotton Bowl",
"This is a summary of the best results obtained in Climbing World Cups and Climbing World Championships organized by the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (from 1989 to 2006) and the International Federation of Sport Climbing (since 2007). Athletes are ranked based on the total number of victories obtained throughout their career across all disciplines (Lead climbing, Bouldering, Speed climbing, Combined disciplines), regardless of the number of seasons needed to obtain them.\n\nWorld rankings with a different definition and purpose are provided elsewhere by the IFSC. They are known as the IFSC World Rankings and are computed separately for each of the main disciplines (Lead, Bouldering, Speed), and are based on the sum of all results obtained by each athlete in the last twelve months.\n\nWhile this summary is meant to be used as a tool to identify the most successful athletes in the history of competition climbing, the IFSC World Rankings are meant to identify the strongest among those who are still competing.\n\nNumber of victories in Climbing World Cups and Championships \n\nAthletes who at least won one World Cup series or World Championship are listed in the tables below. They are ranked based on the number of victories (T) they obtained throughout their career across all disciplines. \n\nSeparate scores are provided for each competition (1 = World Cups and 2 = World Championships) and discipline (L = Lead climbing, B = Bouldering, S = Speed climbing, and C = Combined disciplines). For instance, L1 is the number of Lead climbing World Cups awarded to each athlete. For each athlete, the total number of victories (T) is obtained by adding together the respective separate scores:\nT = L1 + B1 + S1 + C1 + L2 + B2 + S2 + C2\nPartial totals are also provided for each discipline and competition. For instance, the total number of victories obtained in Lead climbing by each athlete is:\nL = L1 + L2\nand the total number of World Cups awarded to each athlete is:\nT1 = L1 + B1 + S1 + C1\n\nMen \nSortable table, pre-sorted by total number of victories (T), updated on June 11, 2019.\n\nWomen \nSortable table, pre-sorted by total number of victories (T), updated on August 20, 2019.\n\nSee also \n International Federation of Sport Climbing\n IFSC Climbing World Cup\n IFSC Climbing World Championships\n\nReferences \n\nIFSC Climbing World Cup\nIFSC Climbing World Championships\nSport climbing competitions"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach",
"how long was he their coach?",
"he led the Packers for nine years,",
"did he lead them to any victories?",
"playoff record of 1-1."
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
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what was his biggest win?
| 4 |
what was Starr biggest win?
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Bart Starr
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Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
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CANNOTANSWER
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Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| false |
[
"Bruce M. Keyter is a South African professional golfer.\n\nKeyter turned professional soon after winning the 1955 South African Amateur Championship. He began his career as an assistant professional at Royal Durban Country Club. His first victory was at the 1956 Transvaal Open where he defeated South African legend Bobby Locke by a shot. It was a surprising victory; Australia's The Argus noted that it was Locke's first defeat in a big South African tournament in 20 years. Two months later, in April, Keyter was runner-up to Gary Player in the South African Open. A year later, in 1957, he won the Natal Open.\n\nIn 1963 Keyter won what was arguably the biggest win of his career at the South African Masters, a triple crown event. He shot 291 (−9) to win by three over Terry Westbrook, Harold Inggs, and Eric Moore. In December he was runner-up in the South African Open for the second time, two strokes behind Allan Henning.\n\nAmateur wins \n1955 South African Amateur\n\nProfessional wins (3) \n1956 Transvaal Open\n1957 Natal Open\n1963 South African Masters\n\nReferences \n\nSouth African male golfers",
"The 2013 British Superbike season was the 26th British Superbike Championship season. Shane Byrne stayed in the championship to defend his title from the previous season on the Paul Bird Kawasaki; Ryuichi Kiyonari returned to the championship on board the Samsung Honda to challenge for his fourth British Superbike Championship, with new team mate Alex Lowes looking to win his first championship after showing his pace at the end of the previous season. Josh Brookes stayed on board the Tyco Suzuki and James Ellison returned to try to win the illusive British title riding the Milwaukee Yamaha in what was billed to be the biggest title fight for years.\n\nRace calendar and results\nThe 2013 MCE Insurance British Superbike Championship calendar was announced on 10 October 2012 by MSVR.\n\nEntry list\n\nChampionship standings\n\nRiders' Championship\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n The official website of the British Superbike Championship\n\nBritish\nBritish Superbike Championship\nSuperbike Championship"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach",
"how long was he their coach?",
"he led the Packers for nine years,",
"did he lead them to any victories?",
"playoff record of 1-1.",
"what was his biggest win?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 5 |
Other than Packers' quarterbacks coach, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
|
Bart Starr
|
Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
|
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach
|
Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| 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"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach",
"how long was he their coach?",
"he led the Packers for nine years,",
"did he lead them to any victories?",
"playoff record of 1-1.",
"what was his biggest win?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach"
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
|
who did he work with?
| 6 |
who did Star work with?
|
Bart Starr
|
Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
|
Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team
|
Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| true |
[
"Thomas McPherson Brown (1906–1989) was a rheumatologist who held unorthodox views about the basis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA), and believed it could be cured with antibiotics.\n\nBrown graduated from Swarthmore College then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School. He did his medical residency at the hospital associated with the Rockefeller Institute.At Rockefeller he did research on synovial fluid from people with RA and in 1937 found Mycoplasma in the fluid from some patients, leading him to believe that RA might be an infectious disease. His work was interrupted by service in World War II; after the war he obtained a position at George Washington University and began to experimentally treat some people with RA with antibiotics, which at the time were a new class of drugs. Some of the people he treated were members of Congress or ambassadors, and some of them responded positively. He presented his work at a conference in 1949; at the same conference, the new drug cortisone was presented, and it overshadowed his work and became the leading treatment for RA.\n\nThroughout his career, Brown fought to have his antibiotic treatments recognized by the medical establishment; they were not.\n\nFootnotes\n\n1906 births\n1989 deaths\nAmerican rheumatologists\n20th-century American physicians",
"Ben Thigpen (November 16, 1908 – October 5, 1971) was an American jazz drummer. He is the father of drummer Ed Thigpen.\n\nHe was born Benjamin F. Thigpen in Laurel, Mississippi. Ben Thigpen played piano as a child, having been trained by his sister Eva. He played in South Bend, Indiana with Bobby Boswell in the 1920s, and then moved to Chicago to study under Jimmy Bertrand. While there he played with many noted Chicago bandleaders and performers, including Doc Cheatham. He played with Charlie Elgar's Creole Band during 1927-1929 but did not record with them. Following this he spent time in Cleveland with J. Frank Terry, and then became the drummer for Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, where he stayed from 1930 to 1947. Much of his work is available on collections highlighting the piano work of Mary Lou Williams, who also played in this ensemble.\n\nAfter his time with Kirk, Thigpen's career is poorly documented. He led his own quintet in St. Louis and recorded with Singleton Palmer in the 1960s.\n\nReferences\n[ Ben Thigpen] at Allmusic\n\nExternal links\n Ben Thigpen recordings at the Discography of American Historical Recordings.\n\nAmerican jazz drummers\n1908 births\n1971 deaths"
] |
[
"Bart Starr",
"Packers coach",
"was bart the packers coach?",
"Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach",
"how long was he their coach?",
"he led the Packers for nine years,",
"did he lead them to any victories?",
"playoff record of 1-1.",
"what was his biggest win?",
"I don't know.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach",
"who did he work with?",
"Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team"
] |
C_72f3a07d556c4e5e9bf92c9f8d3013b8_0
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what position did he play for them?
| 7 |
what position did Starr play for Arizon Firebirds?
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Bart Starr
|
Immediately after his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10-4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager. His regular season record was a disappointing 52-76-2 (.408), with a playoff record of 1-1. Posting a 5-3-1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41-16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983, then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37-26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8-8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and coached the Cleveland Browns before. On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team. CANNOTANSWER
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Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays
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Bryan Bartlett Starr (January 9, 1934 – May 26, 2019) was a professional American football quarterback and coach. He played college football at the University of Alabama, and was selected by the Green Bay Packers in the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, where he played for them until 1971. Starr is the only quarterback in NFL history to lead a team to three consecutive league championships (1965–1967). He led his team to victories in the first two Super Bowls: I and II. As the Packers' head coach, he was less successful, compiling a 52–76–3 () record from 1975 through 1983.
Starr was named the Most Valuable Player of the first two Super Bowls and during his career earned four Pro Bowl selections. He won the league MVP award in 1966. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Packers Hall of Fame in 1977. Starr has the highest postseason passer rating (104.8) of any quarterback in NFL history and a postseason record of 9–1. His career completion percentage of 57.4 was an NFL best when he retired in 1972. For 32 years (through the 2003 season), Starr also held the Packers' franchise record for games played (196).
Early life
Starr was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama to parents Benjamin Bryan Starr (1910–1985), a labor foreman with the state highway department, and Lula (Tucker) Starr (1916–1995). Starr's early life was marked by hardships. Shortly after the start of World War II, his father's reserve unit was activated and in 1942 he was deployed to the Pacific Theater. He was first in the U.S. Army but transferred to the U.S. Air Force for his military career.
Starr had a younger brother, Hilton E. "Bubba" Starr. In 1946, Bubba stepped on a dog bone while playing in the yard and three days later died of tetanus. Starr's relationship with his father deteriorated after Hilton's death. He was an introverted child who rarely showed his emotions and his father pushed Starr to develop more of a mean streak.
Starr attended Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery, and tried out for the football team in his sophomore year, but decided to quit after two weeks. His father gave him the option of playing football or working in the family garden; Starr chose to return to the football field.
In his junior year, the starting quarterback broke his leg and Starr became the starter. He led Lanier to an undefeated season. In his senior season, Starr was named all-state and All-American, and received college scholarship offers from universities across the country. He seriously considered the University of Kentucky, coached by Bear Bryant. Starr's high school sweetheart, Cherry Louise Morton, was planning to attend Auburn and Starr wished to attend a college close to her. Starr changed his mind and committed to the University of Alabama.
College career
During Starr’s freshman year at Alabama, the Southeastern Conference allowed freshmen to play varsity football. Starr did not start for Alabama as a freshman, but he did play enough minutes to earn a varsity letter. His high point of the season came in quarterback relief in the Orange Bowl, when he completed 8 of 12 passes for 93 yards and a touchdown against Syracuse.
Starr entered his sophomore year as Alabama's starting quarterback, safety and punter. His punting average of 41.4 yards per kick ranked second in the nation in 1953, behind Zeke Bratkowski. Alabama recorded a 6–2–3 record and lost in the Cotton Bowl to Rice by a score of 28–6. Starr completed 59 of 119 passes for 870 yards, with eight touchdowns that season.
In May 1954, Starr eloped with Cherry Morton. The couple chose to keep their marriage a secret. Colleges often revoked the scholarships of married athletes in the 1950s, believing their focus should remain on sports. Cherry remained in Jackson, Alabama, while Starr returned to the University of Alabama.
That summer, Starr suffered a severe back injury during a hazing incident for his initiation into the A Club. He covered up the cause by fabricating a story about being hurt while punting a football. He rarely played during his junior year due to the injury. The back injury disqualified him later from military service, and would occasionally bother him the rest of his football career. After a disappointing season of 4–5–2, Harold Drew was replaced by Jennings B. Whitworth as coach of Alabama.
Whitworth conducted a youth movement at Alabama for the 1955 season and only two seniors started for the team. Supposedly healed from the back injury, Starr rarely played in his senior season. Starr's decision to play football for Alabama rather than for Bear Bryant at the University of Kentucky did not sit well with Bryant, and four years later as head coach of the Blue–Gray Football Classic in 1955, Bryant hardly let Bart play at all.
Johnny Dee, the basketball coach at Alabama, was a friend of Jack Vainisi, the personnel director of the Green Bay Packers. Dee recommended Starr as a prospect to Vainisi. The Packers were convinced that Starr had the ability to succeed in the NFL and would learn quickly. In the 17th round of the 1956 NFL Draft, Starr was selected by the Packers, with the 200th overall pick.
Starr spent the summer of 1956 living with his in-laws and throwing footballs through a tire in their backyard in order to prepare for his rookie season. The Packers offered $6,500 (equal to $ today) to sign Starr and he accepted, with the added condition, requested by Starr, that he receive $1,000 up front.
Packers quarterback
Starr began as a backup to Tobin Rote in 1956 and split time with Babe Parilli until 1959, Vince Lombardi's first year as Packers coach. In that season, Lombardi pulled starter Lamar McHan in favor of Starr, and he held the starting job henceforth. The following season, the Packers advanced to the 1960 NFL Championship Game, but lost to the Philadelphia Eagles in Lombardi's only post-season loss as a head coach.
1961 was Starr's first season as a full-time starting quarterback for the Packers, throwing for over 2,400 yards and 16 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to an 11-3 record and a return to the NFL Championship Game, this time against the New York Giants. Starr threw for 164 yards and 3 touchdowns in a 37-0 Packers victory. Starr and the Packers continued their success in 1962, going 13-1. Even though Starr was not the focal point of the Packers' offense, with the running duo of Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung, he still provided a solid passing attack, throwing for a career-high 2,438 yards and 14 touchdowns, leading the league with a completion percentage of 62.5. The Packers repeated as NFL champions, beating the Giants again in the 1962 NFL Championship game, 16-7. While not as impressive with his passing in the early years of his career, Starr was responsible for calling plays on the Packers' offense (which was then the norm), proving to be an effective strategist on offense.
In 1963, the Packers fell short of qualifying for their fourth consecutive NFL Championship Game appearance, with injuries to Starr keeping him from finishing a few games. Even so, Starr still threw for 1,855 yards and 15 touchdowns. In 1964, with Jim Taylor and Paul Hornung struggling to continue their strong running game, Starr started to become more of the focus of the Packers' offensive attack. Vince Lombardi would help this shift by acquiring more capable pass catchers to the offense, trading for receiver Carroll Dale to join with Boyd Dowler and Max McGee, replacing tight end Ron Kramer with Marv Fleming, and drafting more pass-catching running backs in Elijah Pitts and Donny Anderson. With these new offensive weapons, Starr would put up his best passing seasons from 1964 to 1969. In 1964, despite the Packers only going 8-5-1, Starr threw for 2,144 yards, 15 touchdown passes, and only 4 interceptions. He led the league with a 97.1 passer rating.
In 1965, the Packers went 10-3-1, led by Starr's 2,055 passing yards and 16 touchdown passes, a career-high. The Packers and their Western division foe, the Baltimore Colts, finished the season with identical records, so the two teams met in a playoff game to determine the division winner. Starr was knocked out of the game after the first play when he suffered a rib injury from a hard hit, but the Packers managed to win in overtime, 13-10, led by Starr's backup, Zeke Bratkowski. Starr came back and started the 1965 NFL Championship Game against the Cleveland Browns. On a sloppy Lambeau field, the Packers went back to their classic backfield tandem of Taylor and Hornung, with the pair running for over 200 yards. Starr threw for only 147 yards, but that included a 47-yard touchdown pass to Carroll Dale.
In 1966, Starr had arguably the best season of his career, throwing for 2,257 yards, 14 touchdown passes, and only 3 interceptions. He led the NFL with a completion percentage of 62.2 and a 105 passer rating, while leading the Packers to a dominating 12-2 record. Starr would be named the NFL's Most Valuable Player by the Associated Press (AP), the Sporting News, the Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA), and the UPI In the NFL Championship Game against the Dallas Cowboys, Starr had his best postseason performance, throwing for 304 yards and 4 touchdown passes, leading the Packers to a 34-27 victory, and the right to represent the NFL in the first ever Super Bowl, against the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs. Starr had another solid game against the Chiefs, throwing for 250 yards and two touchdowns, both to Max McGee, in a decisive 35-10 Packers win. Starr was named the first-ever Super Bowl MVP for his performance.
1967 was a down year for Starr, especially when compared to his previous three seasons. Bothered by a hand injury for much of the season, Starr threw for only 1,823 yards and 9 touchdowns, with a career-high 17 interceptions thrown. Helped in large part by their defense, the Packers still finished 9-4-1, which was good enough for the Packers to reach the postseason. In the divisional playoff against the Los Angeles Rams, Starr was back in form, throwing for 222 yards and a touchdown pass in a 28-7 Packers triumph. This victory would set the stage for the infamous Ice Bowl against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1967 NFL Championship Game. Consulting with Lombardi on the sideline, Starr suggested a basic wedge play ― with a twist. Instead of handing off to Chuck Mercein as the play dictated (and unbeknownst to his teammates), Starr suggested running it in himself. Having enough of the bitterly cold weather, Lombardi said, “Then do it, and let's get the hell out of here!" Starr almost broke down in laughter as he ran back to the huddle, but held his composure. The quarterback sneak play worked and the Packers went on to beat the Cowboys 21-17. Even in the cold conditions, Starr was still able to throw for 191 yards in the Ice Bowl, with two touchdown passes to Boyd Dowler.
At the Orange Bowl in Miami, the Packers defeated the AFL champion Oakland Raiders 33–14 in Super Bowl II, Lombardi's final game as head coach of the Packers. Starr won his second consecutive Super Bowl MVP award for his performance, where he threw for 202 yards and a touchdown pass, a 62-yard strike to Boyd Dowler. The 1967 Packers remain the only team to win a third consecutive NFL title since the playoff system was instituted in 1933.
Starr had originally planned to retire after the second Super Bowl win in January 1968, but without a clear successor and a new head coach, he stayed on. After Lombardi's departure, Starr continued to be a productive quarterback under new Packers coach Phil Bengston, though injuries hampered him. Starr threw for 15 touchdown passes in 1968, leading the NFL once again in completion percentage (63.7) and passer rating (104.3). Starr struggled to stay healthy again in 1969, but still once again led the league with a 62.2 completion percentage and an 89.9 passer rating, but only threw for 9 touchdowns and 1,161 yards. Starr was able to stay healthy for most of the entire 1970 season, but his age was showing, throwing for only 1,645 yards and 8 touchdowns, the last touchdown passes of his career. In an attempt to prolong his career, Starr had surgeries on his long-ailing throwing arm in July and August 1971. This nearly ended Starr's life, as the initial surgery was botched, nearly causing Starr to bleed to death. The surgeries ended up damaging the nerves in Starr's right arm, causing him to struggle to even grip a football, and while he stayed on the Packers' roster for the entire 1971 season, he only played in three games, usually with a glove on his throwing hand to try to regain his grip on the ball. In February 1972 Starr was set for one last year. He participated in the team's spring camp in Arizona in April, but his throwing shoulder and arm were no longer effective. Starr announced his retirement in July 1972 at age 38.
Starr's playing career ended with the 1971 season, having posted the second-best career passer rating of 80.5 (First at the time was Otto Graham with 86.6).
Packers coach
Immediately following his retirement as a player, Starr served as the Packers' quarterbacks coach and called plays in 1972 under head coach Dan Devine, when the Packers won the NFC Central division title at 10–4 with Scott Hunter under center. He pursued business interests and was then a broadcaster for CBS for two seasons. When Devine left for Notre Dame after the 1974 season, Starr was hired as head coach of the Packers on Christmas Eve. Upon taking the job, he recognized the long odds of a Hall of Fame player becoming a successful head coach. Initially given a three-year contract, he led the Packers for nine years, the first five as his own general manager.
His regular season record was a disappointing 52–76–2 (), with a playoff record of 1–1. Posting a 5–3–1 record in the strike-shortened season of 1982, Starr's Packers made their first playoff appearance in ten years (and their last for another 11 years). They defeated the St. Louis Cardinals 41–16 in the expanded wild card round of 16 teams on January 8, 1983–their first home playoff game since 1967. However, they then lost to the Dallas Cowboys 37–26 in the divisional round the following week. He tallied only three other non-losing seasons as Packers coach. After a disappointing 8–8 finish the following year, Starr was dismissed in favor of his former teammate Forrest Gregg, who previously led the Cincinnati Bengals to Super Bowl XVI in the 1981 season and had coached the Cleveland Browns prior to that.
On January 13, 1984, Starr was named the head coach of the Arizona Firebirds, a proposed expansion team for the NFL in Phoenix. The NFL never granted the would-be ownership group of the Firebirds a team (Phoenix would get the Cardinals in 1988).
Honors
Starr was voted to the NFL Pro Bowl four times. He was voted NFL Most Valuable Player by both AP and UPI in 1966, and was chosen Super Bowl MVP in 1966 and 1967. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1977.
He is one of six Green Bay Packers to have had his number (15) retired by the team. The others are Tony Canadeo (3), Don Hutson (14), Ray Nitschke (66), Reggie White (92), and Brett Favre (4).
On October 17, 1970, President Richard Nixon spoke at a testimonial reception honoring Bart Starr in the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena in Green Bay, Wisconsin. "We honor him as a very great practitioner of his profession, the proud profession of professional football," Nixon said. "And as we honor him for that, we honor him not only for his technical skill but, as I've indicated, also for something that is just as important: his leadership qualities, his character, his moral fiber ... But I think the best way that I can present Bart Starr to his friends is to say very simply that the sixties will be described as the decade in which football became the number one sport in America, in which the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr was proudly the number one Packer."
In 1973, Starr received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.
Starr was elected to the Wisconsin Athletic Hall of Fame in 1981.
Starr has an NFL award named after him. The Athletes in Action/Bart Starr Award is given annually, by a panel of judges, to an NFL player who best exemplifies outstanding character and leadership in the home, on the field, and in the community.
Head coaching record
NFL career statistics
Regular season
Personal life
Starr and his wife Cherry were married for more than 60 years. They had two sons, of whom the younger, Bret, is deceased (1988, age 24, drug overdose), and three granddaughters. He was a Christian.
In 1965, Starr and his wife Cherry helped co-found Rawhide Boys Ranch in New London, Wisconsin, a facility designed to help at-risk and troubled boys throughout the state of Wisconsin. Starr even donated the Corvette he received as MVP of Super Bowl II to help Rawhide during their early years. He was affiliated with Rawhide Boys Ranch until his death. As of 2019, Cherry and Bart Jr. are still spokespersons for Rawhide and are in communication with Rawhide on a frequent basis.
In 1971, Starr and his wife Cherry helped start the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation raising funds for cancer research and care in honor of his late coach, Vince Lombardi. They were active at all their events throughout the years. He and Cherry launched the Starr Children's Fund within the Vince Lombardi Cancer Foundation to continue their legacy of work supporting pediatric cancer research and care.
During his latter years, Starr suffered a number of physical ailments, including ischemic stroke, hemorrhagic stroke, a mild heart attack, seizures, and a broken hip. In June 2015, Starr's family reported that he was undergoing stem-cell therapy in a clinical trial. He managed to attend a ceremony at Lambeau Field on November 26, 2015 retiring QB Brett Favre's jersey number, and a fall 2017 reunion of the Ice Bowl Packers. At Super Bowl 50 in February 2016, the NFL held a pregame ceremony honoring the MVPs of all 49 Super Bowls. Although he wished to attend, Starr was not well enough to travel to the game and instead sent a videotaped greeting from home.
Starr died at the age of 85 on Sunday, May 26, 2019, in Birmingham, Alabama after a period of failing health caused by a serious stroke he suffered in 2014.
References
Claerbaut, David (2004), Bart Starr: When Leadership Mattered, Lanham, MD.:Taylor Trade Publishing
External links
1934 births
2019 deaths
Alabama Crimson Tide football players
Alabama Republicans
American football quarterbacks
Green Bay Packers general managers
Green Bay Packers head coaches
Green Bay Packers players
Journalists from Alabama
National Football League announcers
National Football League general managers
National Football League Most Valuable Player Award winners
National Football League players with retired numbers
Players of American football from Montgomery, Alabama
Pro Football Hall of Fame inductees
Sidney Lanier High School alumni
Sportspeople from Montgomery, Alabama
Super Bowl MVPs
Western Conference Pro Bowl players
| true |
[
"Regardt Dreyer (born 10 December 1982, Johannesburg) is a professional South African Rugby footballer currently playing for Aviva Premiership side Northampton Saints. His preferred position is at Prop.\n\nCareer\nDreyer signed for Northampton Saints along with Juandré Kruger, another fellow South African Rugby player on 6 October 2008 but did not officially join until after his Currie Cup commitments. Although he did not play for the saints in his first season, he played for their reserves team (the Wanderers) helping them winning the Guinness A League. He made his first start the following season.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nNorthampton Profile\n\nSouth African rugby union players\n1982 births\nLiving people\nNorthampton Saints players",
"John Stirk (born 5 September 1955) is an English former footballer. His primary position was as a right back. During his career he played for Ipswich Town, Watford, Chesterfield and North Shields. He also made two appearances for England at youth level.\n\nCareer \n\nBorn in Consett, Stirk played youth football for local non-league team Consett A.F.C. He joined Ipswich Town on schoolboy terms in 1971, and after making two appearances for the England youth team, turned professional in 1973. During his time at Ipswich he was largely a reserve. He made his first-team debut on 5 November 1977, in a Football League First Division match against Manchester City at Portman Road. His manager at the time was Bobby Robson, who later went on to manage the England national football team. Ipswich won the FA Cup in 1978, in what proved to be Stirk's final season at the club. However, Stirk himself did not play in the final, nor did he play in any of the rounds en route to the final.\n\nAnother future England manager, Watford's Graham Taylor, signed Stirk for a transfer fee of £30,000 at the end of the 1977–78 season. Stirk went on to play every Watford league game in the 1978–79 season, as Watford gained promotion to the Second Division. However, Stirk did not play for Watford in the Second Division. Two months before the end of the 1979–80 season, Stirk was sold to Third Division side Chesterfield, at a profit to Watford of £10,000. After making 56 league appearances over two and a half seasons, Stirk left Chesterfield in 1983 moving on to Blyth Spartans then Tow Law Town, and finished his career at non-league North Shields.\n\nReferences \n\n1955 births\nLiving people\nConsett A.F.C. players\nIpswich Town F.C. players\nWatford F.C. players\nChesterfield F.C. players\nEnglish Football League players\nNorth Shields F.C. players\nSportspeople from Consett\nAssociation football fullbacks\nEnglish footballers"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)"
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
What was their second album?
| 1 |
What was Fleet Foxes second album?
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Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
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Helplessness Blues,
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Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| true |
[
"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",
"White Witch is the title of the second studio album by the group Andrea True Connection. It was released in 1977. The album had two singles: and \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\" and \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\". This was the last album released by the group and the vocalist Andrea True would release a new album as a solo release only in 1980.\n\nBackground and production\nAfter the success of her first album and the gold-certified single More, More, More, the band begun to prepeare for their second release. The album production included studio musicians with a new band assembled for the tour, the second line-up, which included future Kiss guitarist Bruce Kulick, it was also produce by the disco pioneers Michael Zager and Jerry Love.\n\nSingles\nThe first single of the album was \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\", it was released in 1977 and became True's second biggest hit, reaching No. 27 on Billboard's pop chart, and #4 on the U.S. club chart, it also peaked #89 in the Canadian RPM's chart. \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" was released as the second and last single of the album (and also of the group) in 1978 and reached #9 on the U.S. club chart, #34 in the UK and #56 on the Billboard Hot 100\n\nCritical reception\n\nThe album received mixed reviews from music critics. Alex Henderson from the Allmusic website gave the album two and a half stars out of five in a mixed review which he wrote that \"while White Witch isn't a bad album, it falls short of the excellence her first album, More, More, More.\" He also stated that there are a few gems in the album \"including the Michael Zager-produced \"What's Your Name, What's Your Number\" and the exuberant, Gregg Diamond-produced \"N.Y., You Got Me Dancing\"\" according to him they're both \"exercises in unapologetically campy fun.\" He concluded that the album \"LP is strictly for diehard disco collectors.\"\n\nTrack listing\nsource:\n\nReferences\n\n1977 albums\nAndrea True albums\nBuddah Records albums"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)",
"What was their second album?",
"Helplessness Blues,"
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
when was it released?
| 2 |
when was Fleet Foxes second album released?
|
Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
|
May 3, 2011
|
Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| true |
[
"When the Bough Breaks is the second solo album from Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward. It was originally released on April 27, 1997, on Cleopatra Records.\n\nTrack listing\n\"Hate\" – 5:00\n\"Children Killing Children\" – 3:51\n\"Growth\" – 5:45\n\"When I was a Child\" – 4:54\n\"Please Help Mommy (She's a Junkie)\" – 6:40\n\"Shine\" – 5:06\n\"Step Lightly (On the Grass)\" – 5:59\n\"Love & Innocence\" – 1:00\n\"Animals\" – 6:32\n\"Nighthawks Stars & Pines\" – 6:45\n\"Try Life\" – 5:35\n\"When the Bough Breaks\" – 9:45\n\nCD Cleopatra CL9981 (US 1997)\n\nMusicians\n\nBill Ward - vocals, lyrics, musical arrangements\nKeith Lynch - guitars\nPaul Ill - bass, double bass, synthesizer, tape loops\nRonnie Ciago - drums\n\nCover art and reprint issues\n\nAs originally released, this album featured cover art that had two roses on it. After it was released, Bill Ward (as with Ward One, his first solo album) stated on his website that the released cover art was not the correct one that was intended to be released. Additionally, the liner notes for the original printing had lyrics that were so small, most people needed a magnifying glass to read them. This was eventually corrected in 2000 when the version of the album with Bill on the cover from the 70's was released. The album was later on released in a special digipak style of case, but this was later said to be released prematurely, and was withdrawn.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nWhen the Bough Breaks at Bill Ward's site\nWhen the Bough Breaks at Black Sabbath Online\n\nBill Ward (musician) albums\nBlack Sabbath\n1997 albums\nCleopatra Records albums",
"Joseph Jin Dechen (; June 19, 1919 – November 21, 2002) was a Chinese Catholic priest and Bishop Emeritus of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Nanyang.\n\nBiography\nHe was ordained a priest in 1944. In 1958, he was arrested for the first time and sentenced to life in prison. This sentence was settled and he was released in 1973. In December 1981, when he was Bishop Emeritus in Roman Catholic Diocese of Nanyang, he was again arrested, charged with resistance to abortion and birth control, and was sentenced to 15 years of prison and five years of subsequent loss of political rights on July 27, 1982. He was detained in the Third Province Prison in Yu County (now Yuzhou), near Zhengzhou in Henan, and was pardoned and released in May 1992 and ordered to stay in his village Jinjiajiang, near Nanyang. He was out of weakness when he was released from prison.\n\nReferences\n\n1919 births\n2002 deaths\n20th-century Roman Catholic bishops in China"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)",
"What was their second album?",
"Helplessness Blues,",
"when was it released?",
"May 3, 2011"
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
What is a success?
| 3 |
Was Fleet Foxes second album a success?
|
Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
|
CANNOTANSWER
|
Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| false |
[
"In probability theory and statistics, the geometric distribution is either one of two discrete probability distributions:\n\n The probability distribution of the number X of Bernoulli trials needed to get one success, supported on the set ;\n The probability distribution of the number Y = X − 1 of failures before the first success, supported on the set .\n\nWhich of these is called \"the\" geometric distribution is a matter of convention and convenience.\n\nThese two different geometric distributions should not be confused with each other. Often, the name shifted geometric distribution is adopted for the former one (distribution of the number X); however, to avoid ambiguity, it is considered wise to indicate which is intended, by mentioning the support explicitly.\n\nThe geometric distribution gives the probability that the first occurrence of success requires k independent trials, each with success probability p. If the probability of success on each trial is p, then the probability that the kth trial (out of k trials) is the first success is\n\nfor \n\nThe above form of the geometric distribution is used for modeling the number of trials up to and including the first success. By contrast, the following form of the geometric distribution is used for modeling the number of failures until the first success:\n\nfor k = 0, 1, 2, 3, ....\n\nIn either case, the sequence of probabilities is a geometric sequence.\n\nFor example, suppose an ordinary die is thrown repeatedly until the first time a \"1\" appears. The probability distribution of the number of times it is thrown is supported on the infinite set { 1, 2, 3, ... } and is a geometric distribution with p = 1/6.\n\nThe geometric distribution is denoted by Geo(p) where 0 < p ≤ 1.\n\nDefinitions\n\nConsider a sequence of trials, where each trial has only two possible outcomes (designated failure and success). The probability of success is assumed to be the same for each trial. In such a sequence of trials, the geometric distribution is useful to model the number of failures before the first success since the experiment can have an indefinite number of trials until success, unlike the binomial distribution which has a set number of trials. The distribution gives the probability that there are zero failures before the first success, one failure before the first success, two failures before the first success, and so on.\n\nAssumptions: When is the geometric distribution an appropriate model?\n\nThe geometric distribution is an appropriate model if the following assumptions are true.\n\nThe phenomenon being modeled is a sequence of independent trials.\nThere are only two possible outcomes for each trial, often designated success or failure.\nThe probability of success, p, is the same for every trial.\n\nIf these conditions are true, then the geometric random variable Y is the count of the number of failures before the first success. The possible number of failures before the first success is 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on. In the graphs above, this formulation is shown on the right.\n\nAn alternative formulation is that the geometric random variable X is the total number of trials up to and including the first success, and the number of failures is X − 1. In the graphs above, this formulation is shown on the left.\n\nProbability outcomes examples\nThe general formula to calculate the probability of k failures before the first success, where the probability of success is p and the probability of failure is q = 1 − p, is\n\nfor k = 0, 1, 2, 3, ....\n\nE1) A doctor is seeking an antidepressant for a newly diagnosed patient. Suppose that, of the available anti-depressant drugs, the probability that any particular drug will be effective for a particular patient is p = 0.6. What is the probability that the first drug found to be effective for this patient is the first drug tried, the second drug tried, and so on? What is the expected number of drugs that will be tried to find one that is effective?\n\nThe probability that the first drug works. There are zero failures before the first success. Y = 0 failures. The probability P(zero failures before first success) is simply the probability that the first drug works.\n\nThe probability that the first drug fails, but the second drug works. There is one failure before the first success. Y= 1 failure. The probability for this sequence of events is P(first drug fails) p(second drug succeeds), which is given by\n\nThe probability that the first drug fails, the second drug fails, but the third drug works. There are two failures before the first success. Y = 2 failures. The probability for this sequence of events is P(first drug fails) p(second drug fails) P(third drug is success)\n\nE2) A newlywed couple plans to have children and will continue until the first girl. What is the probability that there are zero boys before the first girl, one boy before the first girl, two boys before the first girl, and so on?\n\nThe probability of having a girl (success) is p= 0.5 and the probability of having a boy (failure) is q = 1 − p = 0.5.\n\nThe probability of no boys before the first girl is\n\nThe probability of one boy before the first girl is\n\nThe probability of two boys before the first girl is\n\nand so on.\n\nProperties\n\nMoments and cumulants\nThe expected value for the number of independent trials to get the first success, and the variance of a geometrically distributed random variable X is:\n\nSimilarly, the expected value and variance of the geometrically distributed random variable Y = X - 1 (See definition of distribution ) is:\n\nLet μ = (1 − p)/p be the expected value of Y. Then the cumulants of the probability distribution of Y satisfy the recursion\n\nOutline of proof: That the expected value is (1 − p)/p can be shown in the following way. Let Y be as above. Then\n\n \n\n(The interchange of summation and differentiation is justified by the fact that convergent power series converge uniformly on compact subsets of the set of points where they converge.)\n\nExpected Value Examples \nE3) A patient is waiting for a suitable matching kidney donor for a transplant. If the probability that a randomly selected donor is a suitable match is p=0.1, what is the expected number of donors who will be tested before a matching donor is found?\n\nWith p = 0.1, the mean number of failures before the first success is E(Y) = (1 − p)/p =(1 − 0.1)/0.1 = 9.\n\nFor the alternative formulation, where X is the number of trials up to and including the first success, the expected value is E(X) = 1/p = 1/0.1 = 10.\n\nFor example 1 above, with p = 0.6, the mean number of failures before the first success is E(Y) = (1 − p)/p = (1 − 0.6)/0.6 = 0.67.\n\nHigher order moments \nThe moments for the number of failures before the first success are given by\n\nwhere is the polylogarithm function.\n\nGeneral properties \n\n The probability-generating functions of X and Y are, respectively,\n\n Like its continuous analogue (the exponential distribution), the geometric distribution is memoryless. That means that if you intend to repeat an experiment until the first success, then, given that the first success has not yet occurred, the conditional probability distribution of the number of additional trials does not depend on how many failures have been observed. The die one throws or the coin one tosses does not have a \"memory\" of these failures. The geometric distribution is the only memoryless discrete distribution.\n\n Among all discrete probability distributions supported on {1, 2, 3, ... } with given expected value μ, the geometric distribution X with parameter p = 1/μ is the one with the largest entropy.\n The geometric distribution of the number Y of failures before the first success is infinitely divisible, i.e., for any positive integer n, there exist independent identically distributed random variables Y1, ..., Yn whose sum has the same distribution that Y has. These will not be geometrically distributed unless n = 1; they follow a negative binomial distribution.\n The decimal digits of the geometrically distributed random variable Y are a sequence of independent (and not identically distributed) random variables. For example, the hundreds digit D has this probability distribution:\n\nwhere q = 1 − p, and similarly for the other digits, and, more generally, similarly for numeral systems with other bases than 10. When the base is 2, this shows that a geometrically distributed random variable can be written as a sum of independent random variables whose probability distributions are indecomposable.\n\n Golomb coding is the optimal prefix code for the geometric discrete distribution.\nThe sum of two independent Geo(p) distributed random variables is not a geometric distribution.\n\nRelated distributions\n\n The geometric distribution Y is a special case of the negative binomial distribution, with r = 1. More generally, if Y1, ..., Yr are independent geometrically distributed variables with parameter p, then the sum\n\nfollows a negative binomial distribution with parameters r and p.\n\nThe geometric distribution is a special case of discrete compound Poisson distribution.\n If Y1, ..., Yr are independent geometrically distributed variables (with possibly different success parameters pm), then their minimum\n\nis also geometrically distributed, with parameter \n\n Suppose 0 < r < 1, and for k = 1, 2, 3, ... the random variable Xk has a Poisson distribution with expected value r k/k. Then\n\nhas a geometric distribution taking values in the set {0, 1, 2, ...}, with expected value r/(1 − r).\n\n The exponential distribution is the continuous analogue of the geometric distribution. If X is an exponentially distributed random variable with parameter λ, then\n\n where is the floor (or greatest integer) function, is a geometrically distributed random variable with parameter p = 1 − e−λ (thus λ = −ln(1 − p)) and taking values in the set {0, 1, 2, ...}. This can be used to generate geometrically distributed pseudorandom numbers by first generating exponentially distributed pseudorandom numbers from a uniform pseudorandom number generator: then is geometrically distributed with parameter , if is uniformly distributed in [0,1].\n\n If p = 1/n and X is geometrically distributed with parameter p, then the distribution of X/n approaches an exponential distribution with expected value 1 as n → ∞, since\n\nMore generally, if p=λ/n, where λ is a parameter, then as n→ ∞ the distribution of X / n approaches an exponential distribution with rate λ:\n \ntherefore the distribution function of X/n converges to , which is that of an Exponential random variable.\n\nStatistical inference\n\nParameter estimation\n\nFor both variants of the geometric distribution, the parameter p can be estimated by equating the expected value with the sample mean. This is the method of moments, which in this case happens to yield maximum likelihood estimates of p.\n\nSpecifically, for the first variant let k = k1, ..., kn be a sample where ki ≥ 1 for i = 1, ..., n. Then p can be estimated as\n\nIn Bayesian inference, the Beta distribution is the conjugate prior distribution for the parameter p. If this parameter is given a Beta(α, β) prior, then the posterior distribution is\n\nThe posterior mean E[p] approaches the maximum likelihood estimate as α and β approach zero.\n\nIn the alternative case, let k1, ..., kn be a sample where ki ≥ 0 for i = 1, ..., n. Then p can be estimated as\n\nThe posterior distribution of p given a Beta(α, β) prior is\n\nAgain the posterior mean E[p] approaches the maximum likelihood estimate as α and β approach zero.\n\nFor either estimate of using Maximum Likelihood, the bias is equal to \n \n\nwhich yields the bias-corrected maximum likelihood estimator\n\nComputational methods\n\nGeometric distribution using R\n\nThe R function dgeom(k, prob) calculates the probability that there are k failures before the first success, where the argument \"prob\" is the probability of success on each trial.\n\nFor example,\n\ndgeom(0,0.6) = 0.6\n\ndgeom(1,0.6) = 0.24\n\nR uses the convention that k is the number of failures, so that the number of trials up to and including the first success is k + 1.\n\nThe following R code creates a graph of the geometric distribution from Y = 0 to 10, with p = 0.6.\n\nY=0:10\n\nplot(Y, dgeom(Y,0.6), type=\"h\", ylim=c(0,1), main=\"Geometric distribution for p=0.6\", ylab=\"P(Y=Y)\", xlab=\"Y=Number of failures before first success\")\n\nGeometric distribution using Excel\n\nThe geometric distribution, for the number of failures before the first success, is a special case of the negative binomial distribution, for the number of failures before s successes.\n\nThe Excel function NEGBINOMDIST(number_f, number_s, probability_s) calculates the probability of k = number_f failures before s = number_s successes where p = probability_s is the probability of success on each trial. For the geometric distribution, let number_s = 1 success.\n\nFor example,\n\n=NEGBINOMDIST(0, 1, 0.6) = 0.6\n\n=NEGBINOMDIST(1, 1, 0.6) = 0.24\n\nLike R, Excel uses the convention that k is the number of failures, so that the number of trials up to and including the first success is k + 1.\n\nSee also \n\n Hypergeometric distribution\n Coupon collector's problem\n Compound Poisson distribution\n Negative binomial distribution\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\nGeometric distribution on MathWorld.\n\nDiscrete distributions\nExponential family distributions\nInfinitely divisible probability distributions\nArticles with example R code",
"The Lexis ratio is used in statistics as a measure which seeks to evaluate differences between the statistical properties of random mechanisms where the outcome is two-valued — for example \"success\" or \"failure\", \"win\" or \"lose\". The idea is that the probability of success might vary between different sets of trials in different situations. This ratio is not much used currently having been largely replaced by the use of the chi-squared test in testing for the homogeneity of samples.\n\nThis measure compares the between-set variance of the sample proportions (evaluated for each set) with what the variance should be if there were no difference between in the true proportions of success across the different sets. Thus the measure is used to evaluate how data compares to a fixed-probability-of-success Bernoulli distribution. The term \"Lexis ratio\" is sometimes referred to as L or Q, where\n\nWhere is the (weighted) sample variance derived from the observed proportions of success in sets in \"Lexis trials\" and is the variance computed from the expected Bernoulli distribution on the basis of the overall average proportion of success. Trials where L falls significantly above or below 1 are known as supernormal and subnormal, respectively.\n\nThis ratio ( Q ) is a measure that can be used to distinguish between three types of variation in sampling for attributes: Bernoullian, Lexian and Poissonian. The Lexis ratio is sometimes also referred to as L.\n\nDefinition\n\nLet there be k samples of size n1, n3, n3, ... , nk and these samples have the proportion of the attribute being examined of p1, p2, p3, ..., pk respectively. Then the Lexis ratio is\n\n \n \nIf the Lexis ratio is significantly below 1, the sampling is referred to as Poissonian (or subnormal); it is equal to 1 the sampling is referred to as Bernoullian (or normal); and if it is above 1 it is referred to as Lexian (or supranormal).\n \nChuprov showed in 1922 that in the case of statistical homogeneity\n \n \n \nand \n\nwhere E() is the expectation and var() is the variance. The formula for the variance is approximate and holds only for large values of n. \n\nAn alternative definition is\n\nhere is the (weighted) sample variance derived from the observed proportions of success in sets in \"Lexis trials\" and is the variance computed from the expected Bernoulli distribution on the basis of the overall average proportion of success.\n\nLexis variation\n\nA closely related concept is the Lexis variation. Let k samples each of size n be drawn at random. Let the probability of success (p) be constant and let the actual probability of success in the kth sample be p1, p2, ... , pk. \n\nThe average probability of success (p) is \n\n \n\nThe variance in the number of successes is\n\n \n\nwhere var( pi ) is the variance of the pi. \n\nIf all the pi are equal the sampling is said to be Bernoullian; where the pi differ the sampling is said to be Lexian and the dispersion is said to be supranormal. \n\nLexian sampling occurs in sampling from non homogenous strata.\n\nHistory\n\nWilhelm Lexis introduced this statistic to test the then commonly held assumption that sampling data could be regarded as homogeneous.\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\nOverdispersion#Binomial\n\nSummary statistics\nStatistical ratios\nStatistical tests"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)",
"What was their second album?",
"Helplessness Blues,",
"when was it released?",
"May 3, 2011",
"What is a success?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
did they tour?
| 4 |
did Fleet Foxes tour?
|
Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
|
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer
|
Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| true |
[
"\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2011 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2010. Note: Michael Putnam and Justin Hicks had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2010 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates, but Putnam did improve his status.\n\nPlayers in yellow are 2011 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2011 Results\n\n*PGA Tour rookie in 2011\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2012 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2011\n\nSee also\n2010 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nShort bios from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates",
"\nThis is a list of the 29 players who earned their 2012 PGA Tour card through Q School in 2011. Note: Roberto Castro and Mark Anderson had already qualified for the PGA Tour by placing in the Top 25 during the 2011 Nationwide Tour season; they did not count among the Top 25 Q school graduates.\n\nPlayers in yellow were 2012 PGA Tour rookies.\n\n2012 Results\n\n*PGA Tour rookie in 2012\nT = Tied \nGreen background indicates the player retained his PGA Tour card for 2013 (won or finished inside the top 125). \nYellow background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013, but retained conditional status (finished between 126-150). \nRed background indicates the player did not retain his PGA Tour card for 2013 (finished outside the top 150).\n\nWinners on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nRunners-up on the PGA Tour in 2012\n\nSee also\n2011 Nationwide Tour graduates\n\nReferences\nResults from pgatour.com\n\nPGA Tour Qualifying School\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates\nPGA Tour Qualifying School Graduates"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)",
"What was their second album?",
"Helplessness Blues,",
"when was it released?",
"May 3, 2011",
"What is a success?",
"I don't know.",
"did they tour?",
"On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer"
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
| 5 |
Are there any other interesting aspects about this article in addition to their second albom?
|
Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
|
Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty,
|
Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| 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"
] |
[
"Fleet Foxes",
"Second album (2009-12)",
"What was their second album?",
"Helplessness Blues,",
"when was it released?",
"May 3, 2011",
"What is a success?",
"I don't know.",
"did they tour?",
"On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty,"
] |
C_7eff722c1ac0404c99b5e1f10455b2fd_0
|
why did he leave?
| 6 |
why did Tillman leave?
|
Fleet Foxes
|
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009-10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010. In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments. The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument". On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage. Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012. CANNOTANSWER
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criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
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Fleet Foxes is an American indie folk band formed in Seattle, Washington in 2006. The band consists of Robin Pecknold (vocals, guitar), Skyler Skjelset (guitar, mandolin, backing vocals), Casey Wescott (keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals), Christian Wargo (bass, guitar, backing vocals) and Morgan Henderson (upright bass, guitar, woodwinds, violin, percussion, saxophone).
Led by Pecknold, "Fleet Foxes" came to prominence in 2008 with the release of their second EP Sun Giant and their debut album Fleet Foxes on Sub Pop. The band went to release the studio albums Helplessness Blues (2011), Crack-Up (2017), and Shore (2020), all of which received widespread acclaim. Though the band has received modest commercial success, their work has been highly hailed by the music critics, who have praised their lyricism, somber productions, and often noted the band's use of refined instrumentation and vocal harmonies. The band's eponymous debut album is ranked by the Rolling Stone amongst the best albums of the decade, as well being included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The band has been nominated for two Grammy Awards, the first for Best Folk Album in 2012 for Helplessness Blues and the second for Best Alternative Music Album in 2022 for Shore.
History
Formation and early years (2005–06)
Robin Pecknold and Skyler Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over an appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on—Skjelset's mother Peggi was a keen listener to both Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold's father Greg was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two shared an interest in the music of Dylan and Brian Wilson. Pecknold played bass for Seattle's Dolour on a US tour in 2005, shortly before forming the first incarnation of Fleet Foxes.
Originally going by the name "The Pineapples", a name clash with another local band prompted a change and Pecknold decided upon "Fleet Foxes", suggesting that it was "evocative of some weird English activity like fox hunting". Pecknold took up the role of principal songwriter, both singing and playing guitar, while Skjelset played lead guitar. The original lineup was filled out by Casey Wescott on keyboards and backing vocals, Bryn Lumsden on bass and Nicholas Peterson on drums and backing vocals.
Pecknold's late-sixties pop style caught the attention of the Seattle producer Phil Ek and he helped them record their first demo in 2006, the self-released Fleet Foxes EP. Ek was impressed with the band's songwriting, and on hearing Pecknold for the first time, noted, "It was obvious he had talent coming out of his ass." By late 2006 the Seattle press began to take notice of the band; Tom Scanlon of the Seattle Times stated that he was impressed with the band's lyrics and musical maturity. By the end of the year, Lumsden had been replaced on bass by Craig Curran, who would also handle many of the band's vocal harmonies.
With growing popularity on the local circuit, the band set about making their first album in early 2007, spending time in the studio with producer Ek in addition to recording material at home. However, funds for recording were tight, so the band members cobbled together what funds they had, which limited the time they had in the studio, and so the majority of the tracks were recorded in various band members' apartments, other spaces, or the basement of Pecknold's parents' house.
Sun Giant and Fleet Foxes (2007–08)
Fleet Foxes were becoming increasingly popular and by late 2007, they had attracted over a quarter of a million song plays over two months on their Myspace site. Although the band had not released any of their recordings, they benefited from word of mouth exposure and their success soon translated into a record deal, signing with Warner Music subsidiary record label Sub Pop on January 18, 2008. The band's frontman, Robin Pecknold, attributes much of their success and popularity to illegal file sharing.
The band tracked their second EP, Sun Giant, at Bear Creek Studio and performed overdubs and mixed at Seattle's Avast! Recording Co., around the same time in preparation for upcoming tours. Fleet Foxes began their spring tour with another Northwest band Blitzen Trapper on February 28, 2008. Before the recording of the EP, bassist Curran was replaced by Christian Wargo, whose voice, like that of his predecessor, would become an important part of the band's harmony blend. The band's performances, first at the SXSW festival in March 2008, and then the Sasquatch! festival in May 2008, moved the band into the public consciousness, notably attracting attention from the European press for the first time.
Sun Giant was released internationally on April 8, 2008 and the group's brand of folk, rock and pop, marked by their use of vocal harmonies, was well received by the press. Despite the warm critical reception, the group said that the EP did not represent their full ambitions, serving merely as a CD to sell while on tour. In May 2008, the band chose to extend their North American and European tour until September in support of their forthcoming album. At this time Josh Tillman replaced Peterson on drums and backing vocals. Their first full-length album, Fleet Foxes, was released shortly afterwards on June 3, 2008. The album achieved similar critical success as the previous EP. Fleet Foxes received four out of five stars from Rolling Stone, which compared it to the likes of the Beach Boys, Animal Collective, and Crosby, Stills & Nash, and a 9.0 out of 10 in a review by Pitchfork Media, sharing the website's album of the year rank with the Sun Giant EP. The Guardian was particularly complimentary, awarding the album five stars and declaring it "a landmark in American music — an instant classic". On June 24, 2008, Fleet Foxes went to No. 1 on the CMJ Radio 200 Chart. The album achieved an average rating of 87/100 from 30 critic reviews on the aggregator website Metacritic.
While the group enjoyed moderate success in the United States, Fleet Foxes was better received in Europe, selling over 200,000 copies in the five months following its release. The sales were matched with critical plaudits and their debut album won Uncut's first ever Music Award 2008 prize. Uncut'''s editor, Allan Jones, said the album "showed impeccable musicianship, and although you could trace its antecedents, it sounded totally unique. Fleet Foxes was just a glorious debut." The band sold out music venues for their tours of Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, reaffirming their growing popularity.Sauma, Luiza (December 7, 2008). "Fleet Foxes: Are a hairy bunch of young folk-rockers inventing a new sound of Seattle?", The Independent. Retrieved on January 19, 2009.
At the end of 2008, Fleet Foxes was rated album of the year by Billboards Critic's Choice and in Metacritic's end of year best album round-up it appeared in 17 lists, topping six of them. Furthermore, it had sold over 408,000 copies in North America and over 100,000 copies in the United Kingdom, making it the first gold certificate record for UK label Bella Union. Their growing profile enabled the band to make televised appearances, playing on Vincent Moon's La Blogotheque in December 2008 and on Saturday Night Live the following January. In 2009, they toured in Europe to favorable reviews; the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant said their show in Paradiso induced goosebumps. In 2008 and 2009, the band played globally ending the tour in September with a final European leg.
Helplessness Blues (2009–12)
Pecknold said that he would have liked the album to be released in 2009; however, the band's touring schedule delayed rehearsals of the new songs until February 2009. These sessions took place in a rented house outside Seattle, but were mostly scrapped, losing the band $60,000 of their own money. Further delays ensued because the drummer, Tillman, was scheduled to play a solo tour in Europe and North America throughout the 2009–10 winter. Pecknold later sent some demos to producer Phil Ek and expressed the hope that the second LP would emerge in late 2010.
In December 2009, Pecknold said he wanted the new LP to sound "less poppy, less upbeat and more groove-based". He referenced the 12-string guitar sound from Roy Harper's folk album Stormcock, saying, "That will be the primary sonic distancing from the last record." He wanted the band to record very quickly, with "vocal takes in one go, so even if there are fuck-ups, I want them to be on there. I want there to be guitar mistakes. I want there to be not totally flawless vocals. I want to record it and have that kind of cohesive sound. Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, to me, is the best-sounding album because it sounds like there were only six hours in the universe for that album to be recorded in. So I want it to have that feeling." The band eventually began recording in April 2010 in various locations (including West Hurley, New York) under the label Reciprocal Recording and decided to scrap the earlier idea of a fast recording (though according to the band many of the initial vocals were done in one take). The album features a new six-piece band line up, with the addition of the former Blood Brothers bassist Morgan Henderson on upright bass and woodwind instruments.
The album, Helplessness Blues, was released on May 3, 2011 with a cover illustrated by the Seattle artist Toby Liebowitz and painted by Christopher Alderson. The title track was released via free download on January 31, 2011, and the album's fourth track, "Battery Kinzie", was premiered in the UK on Zane Lowe's radio show on March 22, 2011. The Sub Pop record label released a downloadable music video of the track "Grown Ocean", with footage of the album's recording, on its website in support of the album. A 12" vinyl double A-side single of "Helplessness Blues" and "Grown Ocean" was released for Record Store Day on April 16, 2011. On November 1, 2011, Pecknold's brother, Sean Pecknold, released the official music video for "The Shrine / An Argument".
Helplessness Blues was nominated as Best Folk Album at the 2012 Grammy Awards, held February 12, 2012.
Departure of Tillman and hiatus (2012–2016)
On January 18, 2012, after the band had finished touring for the album, drummer Tillman announced that he had left the band. He would go on to reinvent himself and record several albums as Father John Misty, notable for his ironic sense of humor in lyrics and media as well as often criticizing both the record industry and society in interviews and on stage.
In October 2020, Pecknold reflected on Tillman's departure during a Reddit AMA: "[Josh] "quit" the band after recording drums for Helplessness, got into narcotics and made his first Father John Misty album while I was making Helplessness in Seattle. Then Sub Pop offered to put out his album, but only if he delayed it for a year or so and toured Helplessness with us. Which we all weakly agreed to going through with, but it quickly became obvious he'd rather have just been doing that project instead, and I would have rathered that as well. So that tour I had to endure being around a lot of substance abuse, sabotaged shows, just general ill treatment, shit-talking, all while paying him for songs he didn't have anything to do with. It sucked!"
On June 15, 2013, an image of a home recording set-up–including a laptop computer, microphone and guitar–was posted on the Fleet Foxes Facebook page with the caption "Step one". On June 16, 2013, an image of a broken mandolin with the caption "Step two" was posted. These images were later deleted, but led to speculation that the group was working on a new project, possibly a third studio album. On April 23, 2014, Robin Pecknold posted to the band's Facebook page that he had moved to New York to get his undergraduate degree at the Columbia University School of General Studies, a liberal arts college of Columbia University in New York City.
Crack-Up (2016–2018)
On May 18, 2016, while answering fan questions on his Instagram account, Pecknold confirmed that Fleet Foxes were working on new material with drummer and frequent collaborator Neal Morgan, best known for his work with Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan. Describing Morgan as a "full Fox", Pecknold also admitted he "had to up my songwriting game for homeboy." However, when Pecknold posted a photo of the band minus Morgan on Instagram, he clarified that Morgan was one of three drummers involved in the new album, and that for the time being Fleet Foxes would consist of Pecknold, Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, and Henderson as a "five-piece 'core band'", but they would still use a drummer for live performances and additional musicians for certain shows. Pecknold also said that the new material would be "a different vibe" compared to Fleet Foxes' previous output. On November 14, 2016, the band confirmed (via their Facebook account) that their new album was nearly complete.
On December 25, 2016, Pecknold posted a photo on his Instagram account which showed four albums in the Fleet Foxes' queue in his iTunes library: the first studio album Fleet Foxes; the Sun Giant EP; the second studio album Helplessness Blues; and an unknown third album entitled Ylajali. This led to speculation that the band's third album would: 1) be named after a character from Knut Hamsun's novel Hunger; 2) contain a photo from Japanese photographer Hiroshi Hamaya as the cover art; and 3) be released through Nonesuch Records, since the label's logo can be seen on the album cover.
In an email newsletter on January 1, 2017, production company Mason Jar Music confirmed that Fleet Foxes was working on a new album, since they contributed to the production. The album was called Crack-Up, after an F. Scott Fitzgerald essay of the same name. The album is a concept album and was recorded at Electric Lady Studios and Sear Sound in New York City.
On March 7, 2017, Fleet Foxes announced their third studio album, Crack-Up, released on June 16, 2017 via Nonesuch Records, a new label for the band. The lead single, "Third of May / Ōdaigahara", was released the same day. On April 4, 2017, the band posted the album trailer for the new album on YouTube. The trailer briefly presents various songs from the album and shows some images while they were recording them. The video was made by Sean Pecknold, Robin's brother.
On May 15, 2017, Fleet Foxes made their live return at the Wilma Theatre in Missoula, in which they performed nine songs from Crack-Up along with a selection of older material and a cover of "In the Morning" by Bee Gees. The band's current live line-up includes Matt Barrick of The Walkmen, who is also the most heavily featured of the three guest drummers who contributed to Crack-Up. Barrick has continued to play with the band, but has not become an official member. The new album also included the sounds of a brass quartet called The Westerlies.
On October 10, 2017, the band announced the release of a new EP, entitled The Electric Lady Session, for Black Friday Record Store Day 2017. The EP was released on November 24 of that year, and is a collection of live performances of four songs from Crack-Up, originally recorded for their session at Fordham University’s radio station WFUV. For Record Store Day 2018, the band released another EP, entitled "Crack Up (Choral Version)"/"In The Morning (Live in Switzerland)", in collaboration with the Icelandic female choir, Graduale Nobili.
Shore (2019–present)
Work began on a fourth studio album in late 2018, not long after the Crack-Up tour finished. On December 31, 2018, Pecknold teased several new demos online for an upcoming new album.
Recording began in September 2019 at Long Pond Studios in Hudson, New York, and continued at other studios including Electro-Vox Recording Studios in Los Angeles. Pecknold collaborated closely with recording engineer Beatriz Artola during the recording process. Upon the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Pecknold moved to New York City to be able to continue working with Artola. At this point, the majority of the music of the album was well-conceptualized, but the lyrics eluded Pecknold. He eventually developed the lyrics in part over the course of long drives in the New York countryside, and worked to finish the album in July and August 2020. Due to a desire to release the album quickly, Pecknold did not enlist the help of bandmates Skjelset, Wescott, Wargo, or Henderson.
The album was announced in September 2020; titled Shore, it was released on September 22. The album received universal acclaim, scoring 87/100 on Metacritic, and was listed among the best albums of the year by numerous publications. It is nominated for Best Alternative Music Album at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards.
On December 6, 2021, Fleet Foxes announced the release of a new live album entitled A Very Lonely Solstice. The album was released digitally on December 10, 2021. Vinyl and CD releases are scheduled for release in spring 2022 through Anti-. A Very Lonely Solstice is a recording of a virtual, pre-recorded video concert performance that was livestreamed at 9pm ET on December 21, 2020, coinciding with the winter solstice. The concert featured Pecknold performing an acoustic solo set inside the St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn. The album features performances of songs from Shore and older Fleet Foxes songs, as well as cover versions of two tracks.
Members
Robin Pecknold – lead vocals, guitar (2006–present)
Skyler Skjelset – guitar, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Casey Wescott – keyboards, mandolin, backing vocals (2006–present)
Christian Wargo – bass guitar, guitar, backing vocals (2008–present)
Morgan Henderson – upright bass, guitar, woodwind, violin, percussion (2010–present)Former members Bryn Lumsden – bass guitar (2006)
Craig Curran – bass guitar, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Nicholas Peterson – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2006–2008)
Josh Tillman – drums, percussion, backing vocals (2008–2012)Former touring musicians'Matt Barrick – drums, percussion (2017–2018)
Timeline
Discography
Albums
Fleet Foxes (2008)
Helplessness Blues (2011)
Crack-Up (2017)
Shore (2020)
Live albums
A Very Lonely Solstice (2021)
EPs
The Fleet Foxes (2006)
Sun Giant (2008)
Compilation albums
First Collection 2006–2009'' (2018)
References
External links
Fleet Foxes at Nonesuch Records
Official YouTube
American indie folk groups
Musical groups from Seattle
Sub Pop artists
Musical quintets
2006 establishments in Washington, D.C.
Musical groups established in 2006
Bella Union artists
Anti- (record label) artists
Arts & Crafts Productions artists
Nonesuch Records artists
| true |
[
"\"Llangollen Market\" is a song from early 19th century Wales. It is known to have been performed at an eisteddfod at Llangollen in 1858.\n\nThe text of the song survives in a manuscript held by the National Museum of Wales, which came into the possession of singer Mary Davies, a co-founder of the Welsh Folk-Song Society.\n\nThe song tells the tale of a young man from the Llangollen area going off to war and leaving behind his broken-hearted girlfriend. Originally written in English, the song has been translated into Welsh and recorded by several artists such as Siân James, Siobhan Owen, Calennig and Siwsann George.\n\nLyrics\nIt’s far beyond the mountains that look so distant here,\nTo fight his country’s battles, last Mayday went my dear;\nAh, well shall I remember with bitter sighs the day,\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nAh, cruel was my father that did my flight restrain,\nAnd I was cruel-hearted that did at home remain,\nWith you, my love, contented, I’d journey far away;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nWhile thinking of my Owen, my eyes with tears do fill,\nAnd then my mother chides me because my wheel stands still,\nBut how can I think of spinning when my Owen’s far away;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me? At home why did I stay?\n\nTo market at Llangollen each morning do I go,\nBut how to strike a bargain no longer do I know;\nMy father chides at evening, my mother all the day;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me, at home why did I stay?\n\nOh, would it please kind heaven to shield my love from harm,\nTo clasp him to my bosom would every care disarm,\nBut alas, I fear, 'tis distant - that happy, happy day;\nWhy, Owen, did you leave me, at home why did stay?\n\nReferences\n\nWelsh folk songs",
"Leih Sebtaha (Why Did You Leave Her') is the fifteenth full-length Arabic studio album from Egyptian pop singer Angham, launched in Egypt in 2001.\n\nTrack listing\n\n Sidi Wisalak (Your Charm) (Lyrics by: Ezzat elGendy | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Tarek Akef)\n Leih Sebtaha (Why Did You Leave Her) (Lyrics by: Baha' elDeen Mohammad | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Tarek Madkour)\n Rahet Layali (Nights Have Gone) (Lyrics by: Mohammad elRifai | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Yahya elMougi)\n Magabsh Serty (Did He Mention Me) (Lyrics by: Ayman Bahgat Amar | Music composed by: Riyad elHamshari | Music arrangements by: Tarek Akef)\n Leih Sebtaha (instrumental) (Why Did You Leave Her) Lyrics by: Baha' elDeen Mohammad | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Tarek Madkour)\n Tedhak Alaya (You Laugh At Me) (Lyrics by: Saoud elSharabtli | Music composed by: elFaissal | Music arrangements by: Mahmoud Sadek)\n Noujoum elLeil (Stars Of the Night) (Lyrics by: Wael Helal | Music composed by: Ameer Abdel Majeed | Music arrangements by: Ashraf Mahrous)\n Habbeitak Leih (Why Did I Even Love You) (Lyrics by: Nader Abdallah | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Ashraf Mahrous)\n Hayran (Confused) (Lyrics by: Naser Rashwan | Music composed by: Ameer Abdel Majeed | Music arrangements by: Hisham Niyaz)\n Ana Indak (I'm At Your Place)''''' (Lyrics by: Bahaa elDeen Mohammad | Music composed by: Sheriff Tagg | Music arrangements by: Tarek Madkour)\n\nReferences\n\nAngham albums\nArabic-language albums\n2001 albums\nAlam elPhan Records albums"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games"
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
What was Thompsons view on video games?
| 1 |
What was Thompsons view on video games?
|
Jack Thompson (activist)
|
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.
|
John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
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"is a 1993 Japan-exclusive Super Famicom Formula One racing video game licensed by FOCA to Fuji Television, which is based on the 1993 Formula One season.\n\nThe game was supervised by Aguri Suzuki and can be considered as the sequel to Aguri Suzuki F-1 Super Driving. It features a DSP-1 chip. In single-player mode, there is a split screen and the player is given five views to choose from (top view, side view, turn view, camera view and back view), while controlling the car in the typical chase view. There are up to five laps on a given race and speeds can reach an average of .\n\nReception\nOn release, Famicom Tsūshin scored the game a 24 out of 40.\n\nReferences\n\n1993 video games\nFormula One video games\nGenki (company) games\nLOZC G. Amusements games\nJapan-exclusive video games\nSuper Nintendo Entertainment System games\nSuper Nintendo Entertainment System-only games\nVideo games developed in Japan\nVideo games set in 1993\nMultiplayer and single-player video games",
"Power Golf is a golf video game released by Hudson Soft for the TurboGrafx-16 on August 29, 1989 as one of the system's launch titles. It was part of the Power Sports Series, a series of sports games released between 1988 and 1998.\n\nThe game was released for the Wii Virtual Console on October 9, 2007 in Japan, on November 5, 2007, in North America, and on November 9, 2007 in Europe, and was released for the Windows Store on May 1, 2014 and for the Wii U Virtual Console on October 22, 2014 in Japan.\n\nPlayed using primarily an overhead view of each hole, Power Golf features stroke and match play, and a competition mode that supports up to three players.\n\nSee also\nPower Eleven\nPower Sports\n\n1989 video games\nGolf video games\nHudson Soft games\nTurboGrafx-16 games\nVideo games developed in Japan\nVirtual Console games\nVirtual Console games for Wii U\nWindows games"
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"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors."
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C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
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Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
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Aside from Thompson criticizing video games and campaigning against them, are there any other interesting aspects about this article?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
|
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans.
|
John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
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[
"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"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
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Did he give examples?
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Did Thompson give any examples of violent video games being used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"A balanced sentence is a sentence that employs parallel structures of approximately the same length and importance.\n\nExamples\n\"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...\" (A Tale of Two Cities)\n\"White chickens lay white eggs, and brown chickens lay brown eggs; so if white cows give white milk, do brown cows give chocolate milk?\"\nFrom Abraham Lincoln's 1863 Gettysburg Address, two powerful examples: \"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground.\" and \"...that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.\"\n\nReferences\n\nSee also\n Parallelism (grammar)\n Parallelism (rhetoric)\n Sentence clause structure\n\nGrammar\nStyle (fiction)\nNarratology\nWriting",
"Didascaly, Greek Antiquity [modern ad. Greek διδασκαλία instruction, teaching; in plural as in quotation. So modern French didascalie.]\n\n In The Catalogues of the ancient Greek Dramas, with their writers, dates, etc., such as were compiled by Aristotle and others.\n The instruction of the chorus in ancient Greek theatre.\n In ancient Greek theatre, the performance of a tetralogy.\n\nExamples\n 1831 T. L. Peacock, Crotchet Castle vi. M887 70 \"Did not they give to melopoeia, choregraphy, and the sundry forms of didascalies [printed -icsj, the precedence of all other matters, civil and military?\"\n 1849 Grote Greece 11. lxvii. (1862) VI. 26 \"The first, second and third [tetralogies] are specified in the Didaskalics or Theatrical Records.\"\n\nSee also\n Didascaliae\n Didascalia Apostolorum\n\nReferences\n\nTheatre\nGreek words and phrases"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
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what is his evidence to support his claim?
| 4 |
What evidence does Thompson give to support the fact that violent video games are used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
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"A self-authenticating document, under the law of evidence in the United States, is any document that can be admitted into evidence at a trial without proof being submitted to support the claim that the document is what it appears to be. Several categories of documents are deemed to be self-authenticating:\n\nCertified copy of public or business records;\nOfficial publications of government agencies;\nNewspaper articles;\nTrade inscriptions, such as labels on products;\nAcknowledged documents (wherein the signer also gets a paper notarized); and\nCommercial paper under the Uniform Commercial Code.\n\nAlthough most U.S. states have evidentiary rules similar to the Federal Rules of Evidence, the California Evidence Code diverges significantly from the FRE in that it does not treat trade inscriptions as self-authenticating. This means that if a defendant does not stipulate to the authenticity and accuracy of a trade inscription, and the plaintiff lacks testimony from percipient witnesses who can establish a complete chain of custody leading back to the defendant, then the plaintiff must use expert testimony to establish the authenticity of the inscription and to get around the obvious hearsay issue (i.e., to establish, based on common practice within the trade, that the product is what the inscription says it is).\n\nReferences\n\nEvidence law",
"Appeal to the stone, also known as argumentum ad lapidem, is a logical fallacy that dismisses an argument as untrue or absurd. The dismissal is made by stating or reiterating that the argument is absurd, without providing further argumentation. This theory is closely tied to proof by assertion due to the lack of evidence behind the statement and its attempt to persuade without providing any evidence.\n\nAppeal to the stone is a logical fallacy. Specifically, it is an informal fallacy, which means that it relies on inductive reasoning in an argument to justify an assertion. Informal fallacies contain erroneous reasoning in content of the argument and not the form or structure of it, as opposed to formal fallacies, which contain erroneous reasoning in argument form.\n\nExample\n\n Speaker A: Infectious diseases are caused by tiny organisms that are not visible to unaided eyesight.\n Speaker B: That is not true.\n Speaker A: Why is it not true?\n Speaker B: It's obviously ridiculous.\n\nSpeaker B denies Speaker A's claim without providing evidence to support their denial. This may not be unreasonable if the claim is inherently self-contradictory (\"I am not speaking to you right now\") or too malformed to be a sensical claim at all, of course.\n\nHistory\n\nOrigin\nThe name \"appeal to the stone\" originates from an argument between Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell over George Berkeley's theory of subjective idealism (known previously as \"immaterialism\"). Subjective idealism states that reality is dependent on a person's perceptions of the world and that material objects are intertwined with one's perceptions of these material objects.\n\nJohnson's intent, apparently, was to imply that it was absurd of Berkeley to call such a stone \"immaterial,\" when in fact Johnson could kick it with his foot.\n\nClassification\n\nInformal logical fallacies\nInformal logical fallacies are misconceptions derived from faulty reasoning. Informal logical fallacies utilize inductive reasoning and thus can cause errors in reasoning by creating the illusion of a sound argument when it is not sound.\n\nFallacy of irrelevance\nIrrelevant conclusions, also known as ignoratio elenchi (Latin for ''ignoring the list\" or \"ignoring refutation'') or missing the point, follows a similar structure to appeal to the stone. As an informal fallacy, it may not be valid or sound in its reasoning. Irrelevant conclusions hold similarity to appeal to the stone because it provides evidence towards a conclusion that has already been formed about the subject matter being debated, instead of the original subject that was being discussed. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s theory of immaterialism by kicking a stone did not actually address the theory, but rather asserted a conclusion incompatible with the theory and then echoed his conclusion without discussing the subject matter of the theory of immaterialism directly.\n\nInductive reasoning\nAppeal to the stone utilizes inductive reasoning to derive its argument. Formal fallacies use deductive reasoning and formal properties to structure an argument and inductive arguments do not use this structure. Inductive reasoning is reasoning with uncertain conclusions because of inferences made about a specific situation, object, or event. In the context of Appeal to the stone, inductive reasoning is asserted against an initial claim without further elaboration. Inductive arguments can be affected by the acquisition of new information or evidence that can debunk an inductive assumption.\n\nInductive reasoning asserts that the probability of a conclusion being correct is adequate evidence to support the argument. Inductive arguments are judged on the strength or weakness of an argument and an argument's strength is subjective to each participant based on preconceptions about the subject being discussed.\n\nThe weakness of inductive reasoning (in comparison to deductive reasoning), lays in the inability to gauge the validity or soundness of claims within an argument. Validity of an argument is based on whether the information presented is factual. However, if evidence presented to prove a conclusion are false, this can provide a valid argument based on false information to substantiate the conclusion. Therefore, soundness of an argument is deemed when the assumptions of an argument are factual. Unlike deductive reasoning, inductive arguments cannot prove their deductive validity and therefore lead to the problem of induction.\n\nStructure of arguments\nArguments are typically structured by a claim being defended with reasoning and evidence. It typically consists of statements that provide premises to support a conclusion. In the case of appeal to the stone, there is an explicit conclusion but it is likely not substantiated with many premises to validate the conclusion being asserted.\n\nAccording to the theory of argumentation, there must assumptions or premises that follow a method of reasoning or deduction to form the conclusion or point. An appeal to the stone's lack of evidence to substantiate the rejection of the initial claim puts the burden of proof on the other member of the argument and limits rebuttals.\n\nCriticisms\n\nRestricted debate\nIn contrast to the burden of proof (philosophy), appeal to the stone does not allow for debate past the dismissal of the first claim. Therefore, the burden of proof is placed upon the person who made the initial statement to prove it is correct. However, when appeal to the stone is used to argue, there is a diminished ability for a person to create a rebuttal due to lack of elaboration on why there has been a disagreement. Additionally, the appeal to the stone technique is often paired with other logical fallacies that restrict the ability to further dialogue. Discussions when presenting an appeal to the stone argument, it can use ad-hominem attacks to avoid discussion of the discussion’s subject matter, or it can be paired with a straw-man argument to discredit the other member of the discussion.\n\nTwo systems theory\nThe two systems theory, by Israeli psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, explains the reasoning behind illogical fallacies. In the two systems theory, decision-making is categorized into system 1 and system 2. System 1 decision-making only uses quick and usually heuristic based interpretations to aid in low-engagement decisions. System 2 decision-making uses more deliberate and rational consideration when creating a conclusion.\n\nMany illogical fallacies employ quick judgement based on emotion to create conclusions in system 1 type decision-making. However, by having a skeptical mindset on one’s own conclusions and engaging in methodological thinking, one can avoid an illogical fallacy.\n\nToulmin's argumentation framework\n\nAs demonstrated in Toulmin’s argumentation framework, the grounds of an assumption require warrant and backing to legitimize the claim and prove the soundness of the conclusion. The framework involves a claim, grounds, warrant, qualifier, rebuttal, and backing. The initial claim of an argument is the assertion that the arguer is trying to confirm to another member in an argument. The grounds of an argument are the evidence to support the initial assertion. The warrant are the assumptions that are being used to connect the grounds to the claim. Backing is any additional supporting evidence to prove a claim and to support the warrant. Qualifiers are used to show that a claim may not always be correct (such as: sometimes, rather, somewhat) to show that the claim may not always apply to every situation. Finally, a rebuttal provides another member in a discussion to propose another valid claim for the argument.\n\nIn an appeal to the stone, there is only grounds and claims without providing valid warrants or backing to substantiate their claim. Furthermore, appeals to the stone typically do not use qualifiers, limiting the scope of a rebuttal. Without providing valid evidence in a appeal to the stone, it is difficult to provide a rebuttal to the claim.\n\nSimilar theories\n\nReductio ad absurdum\nAppeal to the stone shares similarities in structure to reductio ad absurdum (Latin for “reduction to absurdity”) which states that an argument's assumptions or methods will lead to absurd conclusions. Although appeal to the stone does not explicitly state that an initial statement is absurd, a rejection of the initial claim often times presumes that the initial claim is incorrect or absurd. Reductio ad absurdum makes the assertion that if an initial claim is true, then some other absurd conclusion must also be true.\n\nBegging the question\nBegging the question, also called petitio principii, is a conclusion based on an assumption that requires further proof or elaboration to be validated. Begging the question, is more formally synonymous with “ignoring a question under the assumption it has already been answered.” Begging the question often creates further questioning and colloquial use of this theory has been repurposed to mean “a question that begs to be answered”.\n\nAd nauseam \nAd nauseam is Latin and is associated with repeating something to a sickening or excessive degree. This fallacy can be used in arguments to by asserting an opinion on a subject matter to an excessive degree. In an appeal to the stone, with a lack of evidence to support a rejection of a claim, it can likely lead to an ad nauseum argument. If an argument with an appeal to the stone cannot be resolved, it will likely lead to both parties arguing until they are bored of the discussion and cannot come to a satisfactory conclusion.\n\nDenialism \nDenialism is a rejection of facts and reality even when there is strong evidence. Those using denialism are likely using it with ulterior motives such as self-interests or to avoid an uncomfortable truth. The most common way to rebut a denial is through debunking by dissecting the root of the belief and providing evidence to disprove their idea, point by point.\n\nSee also\n\n Ad hominem\n Solvitur ambulando\n Ignoratio elenchi\n Appeal to ridicule\n Argumentum ad baculum\n Proof by assertion\n I'm entitled to my opinion\n Red herring\n\nReferences \n\nGenetic fallacies\nLatin logical phrases\nLatin philosophical phrases\nEpistemology\nCognitive inertia"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
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What was the result of this?
| 5 |
What was the result of the scientific studies that Thompson claims show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"Elections to West Lindsey District Council were held on 3 May 2007. One third of the council was up for election and the Liberal Democrat Party held overall control of the council after what was seen as a straight fight with the Conservative Party.\n\nThe election in Scotter ward was decided by the toss of a coin which the Conservative candidate won.\n\nAfter the election, the composition of the council was:\n Liberal Democrat 20\n Conservative 16\n Independent 1\n\nElection result\n\nOne Independent candidate was unopposed.\n\nWard results\n\nReferences\n\n 2007 West Lindsey election result\n Ward results\n\n2007\n2007 English local elections\n2000s in Lincolnshire",
"The St. Charles Borromeo Cathedral () Also Chillán Cathedral Is a temple of the Catholic Church, home of the Diocese of Chillán located in the center of the city of Chillán, Chile in front of the Plaza de Armas, in the corner of streets Arauco and Libertad. It is also a symbol and icon of the city, as a result of the city's progress after the Chillan earthquake of 1939. It was declared a National Monument in December 2014.\n\nThe first cathedral of the city of Chillán was established in what today is known as Old Chillán, but this one was destroyed after the earthquake that affected the zone in 1835. As a result, the city was devastated and was transferred and reconstructed in Its current location. The cathedral at that time was made of lime and brick.\n\nAfter the Chillán earthquake of 1939, the cathedral was completely destroyed again, beginning that same year the reconstructions that culminated in 1950. In this new reconstruction, the architect Hernán Larraín Errázuriz was based on ideas of modernism. The figure of the 10 arches represent the prayer and the sign that is made with the hands at the moment of praying intercalando the fingers of the hands and closing them of oval form.\n\nSee also\nRoman Catholicism in Chile\nSt. Charles Borromeo\n\nReferences\n\nRoman Catholic cathedrals in Chile\nRoman Catholic churches completed in 1950\nDiguillín Province\n20th-century Roman Catholic church buildings in Chile\nModernist architecture in Chile\nRebuilt buildings and structures in Chile"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
What was the findings of the search warrant?
| 6 |
What were the findings of the search warrant of McCoy's residence?
|
Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"In Beheermaatschappij Helling I NV v Magistrate, Cape Town (2007), the applicants, who were, variously, Dutch and South African nationals, sought orders declaring:\n\n three search warrants, issued for purposes of assisting in obtaining evidence for use against the applicants in the Netherlands, to be unconstitutional and invalid;\n the execution of the searches by members of the SAPS to be unconstitutional and invalid;\n the actions of the police in allowing the Dutch authorities access to and copies of the material seized to be unconstitutional and invalid; and\n an order directing the return to the applicants of the original and/or copies of the material seized which were still in the possession or under the control of the respondents.\n\nThe court made note of the following applicable legal principles:\n\n The terms of a search warrant had to be construed with reasonable strictness and, ordinarily, literally.\n A warrant had to convey, intelligibly, the ambit of the search it authorized.\n If the warrant was too general, or if its terms went beyond those permitted by the authorizing statute, it was liable to be found to be invalid and to be set aside.\n It had to specify its object intelligibly and within the bounds of the empowering statute.\n\nThe court found that\n\n the warrants placed no limit on the number or nature of the documents liable to be seized;\n they gave no indication as to how far back in time the searches could extend;\n the descriptions of certain of the documents liable to be seized were vague and extremely wide; and,\n as revealed by the off-site searches, most of the material seized in execution of the first warrant was not authorized by the warrants; most of it was confidential.\n\nIn respect of the search of the applicants' offices, the search warrant authorized only a search for and seizure of \"documentation.\" Construing the warrant with reasonable strictness, and in accordance with its express wording, it did not authorize the seizure of the CPUs and other equipment for storing electronic information from the premises. Nor did it authorize an off-site search.\n\nFurthermore, the-off site search had not been necessary, as the electronic data found by the police could have been copied at the premises without the necessity of removing it off-site and thus disrupting the applicants' business for several days. It was trite that search and seizure had to be carried out in the least intrusive and disruptive manner. The police had no power to disrupt the applicants' business more than was necessary. In the circumstances, the removal by the police of the bulk of the electronic material from the applicants' offices was unlawful, in that it was not authorized by the warrant.\n\nThe court also held that all three search warrants were fatally flawed by being both too vague and too broad.\n\nIt followed that the issuing of the warrants, as well as the searches themselves, were unlawful. In addition, the material seized at the applicants' offices was not authorized by the warrant. The warrants, therefore, were declared invalid, and the respondents were directed to return the material seized.\n\nNotes \nBeheermaatschappij Helling I NV v Magistrate, Cape Town 2007 (1) SACR 99 (C)\nAnnual Survey of South African Law 2007, p 351\n\"Again search warrants\" (2007) 100 Servamus 71\n\nSouth African case law\n2007 in case law\n2007 in South African law",
"Aguilar v. Texas, 378 U.S. 108 (1964), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that “[a]lthough an affidavit supporting a search warrant may be based on hearsay information and need not reflect the direct personal observations of the affiant, the magistrate must be informed of some of the underlying circumstances relied on by the person providing the information and some of the underlying circumstances from which the affiant concluded that the informant, whose identity was not disclosed, was credible or his information reliable.” Along with Spinelli v. United States (1969), Aguilar established the Aguilar–Spinelli test, a judicial guideline for evaluating the validity of a search warrant based on information provided by a confidential informant or an anonymous tip. The test developed in this case was subsequently rejected and replaced in Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213 (1983).\n\nBackground \nOn or about January 1, 1960, two Houston Police Department officers placed Aguilar's residence under surveillance. On January 8, 1960, the officers applied for a warrant to search the premises. The officers believed Aguilar possessed narcotics intended for sale, and further alleged corroboration by \"reliable information from a credible person\". The police executed the search warrant and announced at the residence door that they were police with a warrant. After hearing commotion in the house the police forced entry, seized Aguilar, and recovered a bag of narcotics he attempted to flush down the drain.\n\nAt his trial in the state court, Aguilar objected to the inclusion of evidence obtained as a result of the search warrant. Aguilar argued that the affidavit backing the search warrant was \"nothing more than hearsay.\" The state court held the affidavit sufficient enough to admit the evidence, leading to Aguilar's conviction for illegal possession of heroin. On appeal, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the conviction. Aguilar then petitioned the Supreme Court and his petition was granted.\n\nMajority Opinions \nJustice Goldberg delivered the opinion of the court which held that \"[t]he standard of reasonableness for obtaining a search warrant is the same under the Fourth and the Fourteenth Amendments\", citing The court also held that \"[a]lthough an affidavit supporting a search warrant may be based on hearsay information and need not reflect the direct personal observations of the affiant, the magistrate must be informed of some of the underlying circumstances relied on by the person providing the information and some of the underlying circumstances from which the affiant concluded that the informant, whose identity was not disclosed, was credible or his information reliable\", citing \n\nJustice Harlan concurred.\n\nDissenting Opinions \nJustice Clark dissented, joined by Justice Black and Justice Stewart. The dissent argued that \"[t]he Court holds the affidavit insufficient and sets aside the conviction on the basis of two cases, neither of which is controlling.\"\n\nSee also\nList of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 378\nIllinois v. Gates (1983)\n\nReferences\n\nFurther reading\n\nExternal links\n\nUnited States Supreme Court cases\nUnited States Supreme Court cases of the Warren Court\nOverruled United States Supreme Court decisions\nUnited States Fourth Amendment case law\n1964 in United States case law\nIncorporation case law"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.",
"What was the findings of the search warrant?",
"the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
Were these findings significant?
| 7 |
Were the discovery of additional games including State of Emergency, Max Payne and Dead to Rights significant?
|
Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"The year 1821 in archaeology involved some significant events.\n\nExplorations\n October - John Gardner Wilkinson begins a twelve-year stay in Egypt, surveying historical sites.\n\nExcavations\n\nPublications\n\nFinds\n'Gallagh Man', an Iron Age bog body, is found in County Galway, Ireland.\n\nAwards\n\nMiscellaneous\n\"Egyptian Hall\" in London displays artifacts from Ancient Egypt brought to the United Kingdom by Giovanni Battista Belzoni.\nWhile not specifically the year 1821, this time period is when one of the most significant categorical discoveries of archaeology was named. Christian Thomsen, a Danish archaeologist, developed the three age system to date objects in museums. These three ages were the \"Stone Age,\" \"Bronze Age,\" and \"Iron Age.\" \nWhile not specifically the year 1821, this time period is when one of the most significant findings regarding time and dating archaeological findings was discovered. Boucher de Perthes established a much deeper sense of time than what James Usher had previously established. Perthes determined that the world was significantly older than 4004 BC and thus gave archaeology a deeper, more realistic time frame to work with.\n\nBirths\n\nDeaths\n\nSee also\nAncient Egypt / Egyptology\n\nReferences\n\nArchaeology\nArchaeology by year\nArchaeology\nArchaeology",
"The Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth was constructed between 1931-1932, with intentions to display the numerous recent archaeological excavations. The museum is located within the archaeological site of Ancient Corinth, Greece, and lies under the jurisdiction of the 37th Ephoreia of the Greek Archaeological Service.\n\nMuseum history \nThe building was designed by architect Stuart Thompson, constructed by the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, with respect to a generous donation made by Ada Small Moore. Thompson’s design of the museum derived from the architectural model of the “Chicago school”. In 1951, the west part of the building was extended, allowing space within the museum to be organised around two atriums.\n\nBetween 2007-2008 renovations occurred as a result of the 3rd Community Support Framework (CSF). Improvements were made to two galleries consisting of the prehistoric collections and the findings from the Sanctuary of Asklepios. In 2015, the east and south areas of the museum now contained new large-scale works. The 2007-2013 National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) was able to assist in funding a new exhibition project in the refurbished east and south areas of the building, consisting of works from the Geometric Period until its demolition by the Romans in 146 B.C.\n\nAncient Corinth \n\nEarly excavations of the archaeological site of Ancient Corinth began in 1896 and has since continued.\n\nThe Temple of Apollo, one of the most significant monuments of Ancient Corinth was built approximately 540 B.C. Acting as an emblem for the Greek city of Corinth, this monument dominated Ancient Corinth, reflecting its growth and prosperity. Further investigations discovered the remains originated from the Early Neolithic period (6500-5750 B.C.) through to early modern age.\n\nOther key aspects of the Archaeological site of Ancient Corinth include:\n\n Lechaion Road\n Basilica\n Fountain of Peirene\n Stoa\n Agora\n Odien\n Other temples\n Theatre\n Surrounding shops\n\nFindings of archaeological works at the site are enclosed in the Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth. This includes the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore on the slopes of Acrocorinth, in the Potters' Quarter, at the sites of the Sanctuary of Asklepios and Kenchreian Gate Basilica.\n\nExhibitions \n\nThe Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth contains an extensive collection of artefacts originally found in Ancient Corinth. The archaeological findings exhibited in the galleries convey the history of various items of sculptures and inscriptions from different time periods and findings.\n\nPrehistoric Gallery \nThe gallery \"Corinth at Prehistoric times\", contains findings originated from the area of Ancient Corinth, the Korakou Hill and the site of Zygouries. These findings include various vases and cult figurines, which are physical proof of the intense activity and settlement that occurred in these regions during the prehistoric period.\n\nClassical Gallery \nThe gallery \"Corinth, a powerful city-state\", contains findings originally from the Geometric, Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic City of Corinth. The exhibition is composed of two areas:\n\n The first section contains the twin Kouroi, which were confiscated from traffickers of antiquities at Klenia in Corinth. It also consists of findings located from the Tenea cemetery, along with objects from significant agglomerations and sanctuaries of the city-state\n The second part of the exhibition includes objects and audiovisual material which convey Corinth's distinctive cultural character. These items provide a more realistic approach on Corinth's commercial activity, artistic achievements, domestic life, cult beliefs, burial practices and military events, all important aspects which established the fundamentals of this Greek city.\n\nAfter 2012, the exhibition experienced reconstruction specifically to the east and south sections of the museum and then became accessible to the public in 2016.\n\nRoman Gallery \nThe gallery \"Corinth, a Roman colony\", contains findings located in the Roman, Byzantine and Frankish city. Other objects on display include some artefacts stolen from the museum in 1990, but were returned in 2001. Numerous sculptures and interesting mosaics found in Roman villas of the Colonia Laus Lulia Corinthiensis are shown in this exhibition. Other unique objects are also present, majority consisting of glazed plates originating from the Byzantine era of the city, as well as from the Frankish rule.\n\n\"Corinth, a Roman colony\", includes a section within the exhibition named \"Return to the homeland\". It has 274 repatriated ancient objects on display which were previously stolen in 1990 and a decade later were traced to the USA.\n\nAsklepieon Gallery \nThe gallery entitled \"Asklepeion, the healing sanctuary\", contains findings situated form the Sanctuary of Asklepios and the Early Christian cemetery. The exhibit includes unique findings from the sanctuary of Asklepios in Ancient Corinth. Majority of these artefacts were clay offerings shaped as human body parts, as well as Byzantine funerary stelae from Corinth's early Christian cemetery.\n\nAtrium \nThe gallery includes a collection of statues, sculptures, Greek and Latin inscriptions as well as findings that serve as proof of the presence of the Judaic community in the Roman city.\n\nOther significant items \n Mycenaean Krater - Large amphoroid krater with chariot scene detail. Artefact originated from the area of Julian Basilica. Found in \"Corinthis at prehistoric times\" gallery\n Mosaic floor from a Roman villa - Mosaic floor decorated with the head of Dionysos, framed by ornaments. Archaeological item originated from Roman villa, and dates approximately to the 2nd century A.D.\n\nOther information\n\nRecent News \n\n The Archaeological Museum of Ancient Corinth is one of the two Greek museums among the 60 nominees around Europe for the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) for 2020. The EMYA ceremony will take place amongst April 29-May 2.\n Suspension of operation of Greece's museums and archaeological sites occur until March 30 as a result staff shortages. Shortages of guards at these significant sites and buildings decrease staff safety as well as the protection of the museums and monuments. The decision was finalised by the culture ministry.\n\nAccess \n\n Suburban Railway - Museum can be accessed by transporting via the Suburban Railway Network Athens, boarding route Athens International Airport at Kiato Corinth, Corinth railway station\n Intercity Bus - City of Corinth has efficient Intercity Bus Services, with frequent bus services from city directly to Archaeological site of Ancient Corinth\n Car - Detour can be made via Ancient Corinth National Highway Corinth - Patra with direction to Patras (Ancient Corinth node)\n Parking - Nearby parking space available for both cars and buses\n\nReferences \n\nAncient Corinth\nCorinth"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.",
"What was the findings of the search warrant?",
"the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights.",
"Were these findings significant?",
"he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia."
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C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
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Was the case won?
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Was the insanity defense case for McCoy won?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
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[
"The 1975 Philta International Championships was a men's tennis tournament played an outdoor hard courts in Manila, Philippines. It was the third edition of the tournament and was held from 27 October through 2 November 1975. The tournament was part of the Grand Prix tennis circuit and categorized in Group A. Ross Case won the singles title and the $12,000 first prize money.\n\nFinals\n\nSingles\n Ross Case defeated Corrado Barazzutti 6–3, 6–1\n It was Case's 1st singles title of the year and the 4th of his career.\n\nDoubles\n Ross Case / Geoff Masters defeated Syd Ball / Kim Warwick 6–1, 6–2\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n ITF tournament edition details\n\nPhilippine International Tennis Tournament\n International Tennis Tournament\nPhilippine International Tennis Tournament\nPhilippine International Tennis Tournament\nTennis in the Philippines",
"The 1902 Case football team represented the Case School of Applied Science in the American city of Cleveland, Ohio, now a part of Case Western Reserve University, during the 1902 college football season. The team's coach was Joseph Wentworth. Case won its first conference title and first Ohio Athletic Conference title.\n\nCoach Wentworth was the highest paid football coach in the US when hired in 1902 at $3,000.\n\nSchedule\n\nReferences\n\nCase\nCase Western Reserve Spartans football seasons\nCase football"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.",
"What was the findings of the search warrant?",
"the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights.",
"Were these findings significant?",
"he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.",
"Was the case won?",
"I don't know."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
Why was he not allowed to show the evidence?
| 9 |
Why was Thompson not allowed to show the evidence of additional violent games uncovered at McCoy's residence?
|
Jack Thompson (activist)
|
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
|
defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"In law, the doctrine of chances is a rule of evidence that allows evidence to show that it is unlikely a defendant would be repeatedly, innocently involved in similar, suspicious circumstances.\n\nNormally, under Federal Rule of Evidence 404, evidence of other crimes, wrongs, or acts is not admissible to prove the character of a person in order to show action in conformity therewith.\n\nUsing the doctrine of chances allows a prosecutor to admit evidence of prior \"accidents\" that can persuade a jury that prior incidents are so similar that it is very improbable that the case at bar is actually accidental.\n\nThe doctrine of chances was first developed by English courts in the case Rex v. Smith, 11 Cr. App. R. 229, 84 L.J.K.B. 2153 (1915), better known as the \"brides in the bath murder\". In this case the defendant was accused of murdering his wife by drowning her in a bath. The defendant claimed that his wife had fainted in the bath. The prosecutor sought to include evidence in the trial that the defendant's two previous wives had both died in the same way. The evidence was allowed.\n\nReferences \n United States v. Tyndale, 56 M.J. 209, 213 (C.A.A.F. 2001)\n Federal Rule of Evidence 404\n\n \nEvidence law\nLegal doctrines and principles",
"United States v. Lawrence, 3 U.S. (3 Dall.) 42 (1795), was a United States Supreme Court case determining that the Supreme Court cannot normally compel a federal trial judge to proceed in a case which he feels is lacking sufficient evidence to proceed. In the case, the court held:\nWhere a judge of the district court, acting in his judicial capacity, determined that evidence was not sufficient to authorize him to proceed in a case before him, this Court has no power to compel him to decide according to the dictates of any judgment but his own, whatever might be the difference of sentiment entertained by the court.\n\nA motion was made by the Attorney General of the United States (Bradford) for a rule to show cause why a mandamus should not be directed to John Lawrence, Judge of the District of New York, in order to compel him to issue a warrant, for apprehending Captain Barre, commander of the frigate Le Perdrix, belonging to the French Republic.\n\nSee also\n List of United States Supreme Court cases, volume 3\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n \n\nUnited States Supreme Court cases\nUnited States Supreme Court cases of the Jay Court\nUnited States evidence case law\n1795 in United States case law"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.",
"What was the findings of the search warrant?",
"the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights.",
"Were these findings significant?",
"he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.",
"Was the case won?",
"I don't know.",
"Why was he not allowed to show the evidence?",
"defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia."
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
What other video games was he against?
| 10 |
Besides The Getaway, State of Emergency, Max Payne and Dead to Rights, what other video games was Thompson against?
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Jack Thompson (activist)
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Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,
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John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"When Two Worlds War is a 1993 video game by Impression Games. It is a strategic simulation of interplanetary conflict.\n\nCritical reception \nAmiga Format thought the game was neither simplistic nor shallow. Meanwhile, CU Amiga Magazine felt the game was identical to Utopia in every way, sans the fun.\n\nComputer Gaming Worlds Martin Cirulis praised the packaging and the manuals, with the interface being described as \"exceptionally clear and easy to use.\" On the gameplay front, he felt that the game lacked personality, with \"potential strengths... left unexplored.\" He found the AI too easy to win against, even at the highest level. Overall, he thought that while the game was not bad, the delivery fell short of the potential, comparing the game to getting Battlestar Galactica when Star Wars was what had been promised.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n Mobygames\n\n1993 video games\nAmiga games\nBusiness simulation games\nDOS games\nVideo games developed in the United Kingdom",
"Mail Order Monsters is an action-strategy computer game created by Paul Reiche III, Evan Robinson, and Nicky Robinson. It was published by Electronic Arts (Ariolasoft in Europe) for the Commodore 64 in 1985, then released for Atari 8-bit family in 1986. Players create monsters which they can use to battle multiplayer or against computer-controlled opponents.\n\nGameplay \n\nThe players create a variety of monsters and equip them with futuristic and modern weapons to do battle. Monsters can be further customized through buying special abilities, such as adding tentacles to use advanced weaponry. Two players can fight against each other, play capture the flag, or compete for a high score against a computer-controlled horde. In single-player mode, the computer controls an opponent to fight. Battles take place on various different maps that can have tactical effects, such as mountains for agile monsters to hide behind during combat. Monsters can be stored on diskette and can be upgraded by victories against other monsters or computer opponents.\n\nDevelopment\nReiche had previously worked with designers Jon Freeman and Anne Westfall of Free Fall Associates on the game Archon for EA. The game was originally envisioned as dark and gritty, but Electronic Arts demanded a more whimsical style. During this development, Reiche became fascinated with his friend Greg Johnson's development on Starflight, and spent a few weeks consulting on it before he realized he was \"supposed to be working on Mail Order Monsters\".\n\nReception \nAhoy! stated that Mail Order Monsters was a \"very good game\" that did not reach \"true excellence\" because of insufficient combat tactics, and suggested that it was best for younger players. Writing in Vintage Games, Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton identify it as a precursor to the Pokémon series.\n\nIn a retrospective, Levi Buchanan of IGN said that although he would love to see a remake, any new version, updated to suit modern gamers, would necessarily have to diverge from what made the game unique in 1985.\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n \n Mail Order Monsters at Atari Mania\n\n1985 video games\nAriolasoft games\nAtari 8-bit family games\nCommodore 64 games\nDinosaurs in video games\nElectronic Arts games\nAction video games\nStrategy video games\nVideo games developed in the United States"
] |
[
"Jack Thompson (activist)",
"Video games",
"What was Thompsons view on video games?",
"Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors.",
"Are there any other interesting aspects about this article?",
"His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as \"murder simulators\" to rehearse violent plans.",
"Did he give examples?",
"When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room.",
"what is his evidence to support his claim?",
"he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior.",
"What was the result of this?",
"Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence.",
"What was the findings of the search warrant?",
"the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights.",
"Were these findings significant?",
"he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.",
"Was the case won?",
"I don't know.",
"Why was he not allowed to show the evidence?",
"defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia.",
"What other video games was he against?",
"Grand Theft Auto: Vice City,"
] |
C_38fea3c8a4754803b7ee734b5680e55e_1
|
Why was he so against this video game?
| 11 |
Why was Thompson so against Grand Theft Auto: Vice City?
|
Jack Thompson (activist)
|
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked." Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory." Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy, Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense". CANNOTANSWER
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His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans.
|
John Bruce Thompson (born July 25, 1951) is an American activist and disbarred attorney, based in Coral Gables, Florida. He is known for his role as an anti-video-game activist, particularly against violence and sex in video games. During his time as an attorney, Thompson focused his legal efforts against what he perceives as obscenity in modern culture. This included rap music, broadcasts by shock jock Howard Stern, and the content of video games and their alleged effects on children.
He is also known for his unusual filings to The Florida Bar, including challenging the constitutionality of The Florida Bar itself in 1993. Later the Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insulting to the integrity of the court". On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. In July 2008, Thompson was permanently disbarred by the Supreme Court of Florida for inappropriate conduct, including making false statements to tribunals and disparaging and humiliating litigants.
Background
Thompson grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, attended Cuyahoga Falls H.S. and attended Denison University. He received media attention when he hosted his own political talk show on the college radio station. He then attended Vanderbilt University Law School, where he met his wife, Patricia. In 1976, they moved to Florida, where Thompson, working as a lawyer and then a fund-raiser for a Christian ministry, began attending the Key Biscayne Presbyterian Church and became a born-again Christian. Thompson admits to having a "colorful disciplinary history" as an attorney.
The Neil Rogers Show
In 1988, Thompson became involved in a feud with WIOD Radio host Neil Rogers, after Thompson was instrumental in persuading the FCC to fine WIOD $10,000 for airing such parody songs as "Boys Want Sex in the Morning" on Rogers' show. Thompson also sued the station for violating a December 1987 agreement to end on-air harassment against him. For the next eight months, Thompson recorded all of Rogers' broadcasts and documented 40,000 mentionings of his name. Thompson claimed that one of the terms of his agreement with the station was that the station would pay him $5,000 each time his name was mentioned, totaling $200 million in the suit.
Janet Reno
Thompson first met Janet Reno in November 1975, when he applied for a job as an assistant state's attorney in Miami-Dade County, Florida, but was not hired. In 1988, he ran for prosecutor against then-incumbent Dade County State Attorney Janet Reno, after she had declined his request to prosecute Neil Rogers. Thompson gave Reno a letter at a campaign event requesting that she check a box to indicate whether she was homosexual, bisexual, or heterosexual. Thompson said that Reno then put her hand on his shoulder and responded, "I'm only interested in virile men. That's why I'm not attracted to you." He filed a police report accusing her of battery for touching him. In response, Reno asked Florida governor Bob Martinez to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate. The special prosecutor rejected the charge, concluding that it was "a political ploy". Reno was ultimately re-elected with 69% of the vote. Thompson repeated allegations that Reno was a lesbian when she was nominated as U.S. Attorney General, leading one of her supporters, lieutenant governor Buddy MacKay, to dismiss him as a "kook".
In 1990, after his election loss, Thompson began a campaign against the efforts of Switchboard of Miami, a social services group of which Reno was a board member. Thompson charged that the group placed "homosexual-education tapes" in public schools. Switchboard responded by getting the Supreme Court of Florida to order that he submit to a psychiatric examination. Thompson did so and passed. Thompson has since stated that he is "the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida".
Rap music
Thompson came to national prominence in the controversy over 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album. (Luke Skyywalker Records, the company of 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, had previously released a record supporting Reno in her race against Thompson.) On January 1, 1990, he wrote to Martinez and Reno asking them to investigate whether the album violated Florida obscenity laws. Although the state prosecutor declined to proceed with an investigation, Thompson pushed local officials in various parts of the state to block sales of the album, along with N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton. In sending documents to opponents, Thompson would frequently attach a photocopy of his driver's license, with a photo of Batman pasted over his own. Thompson said, "I have sent my opponents pictures of Batman to remind them I'm playing the role of Batman. Just like Bruce Wayne helped the police in the movie, I have had to assist the sheriff of Broward County." He also wore a Batman wristwatch. Thompson compared Campbell to the Joker. Thompson also said, "I understand as well as anybody that the First Amendment is a cornerstone of a free society—but there is a responsibility to people who can be harmed by words and thoughts, one of which is the message from Campbell that women can be sexually abused."
Thompson also took issue with another 2 Live Crew song, "Banned in the U.S.A.". He sent a letter to Jon Landau, manager of Bruce Springsteen, whose song "Born in the U.S.A." was to be sampled by the group. Thompson suggested that Landau "protect 'Born in the U.S.A.' from its apparent theft by a bunch of clowns who traffic toxic waste to kids," or else Thompson would "be telling the nation about Mr. Springsteen's tacit approval" of the song, which, according to Campbell, "expresses anger about the failure of the First Amendment to protect 2 Live Crew from prosecution". Thompson also said, "the 'social commentary' on this album is akin to a sociopath's discharging his AK-47 into a crowded schoolyard, with the machine gun bursts interrupted by Pee-wee Herman's views on politics".
The members of 2 Live Crew responded to these efforts by suing the Broward County sheriff in federal district court. The sheriff had previously told local retailers that selling the album could result in a prosecution for obscenity violations. While they were granted an injunction because law enforcement actions were an unconstitutional prior restraint on free speech, the court ruled that the album was in fact obscene. However, an appellate court reversed the obscenity ruling, because simply playing the tape was insufficient evidence of the constitutional requirement that it had no artistic value.
As the debate continued, Thompson wrote, "An industry that says a line cannot be drawn will be drawn and quartered." He said of his campaign, "I won't stop till I get the head of a record company or record chain in jail. Only then will they stop trafficking in obscenity". Bob Guccione Jr., founder of Spin magazine, responded by calling Thompson "a sort of latter-day Don Quixote, as equally at odds with his times as that mythical character was," and argued that his campaign was achieving "two things...: pissing everybody off and compounding his own celebrity". Thompson responded by noting, "Law enforcement and I put 2 Live Crew's career back into the toilet where it began."
Thompson wrote another letter in 1991, this time to the Minnesota attorney general Skip Humphrey, complaining about the N.W.A album Niggaz4Life. Humphrey warned locally-based Musicland that sales of the album might violate state law against distribution of sexually explicit material harmful to minors. Humphrey also referred the matter to the Minneapolis city attorney, who concluded that some of the songs might fit the legal definition if issued as singles, but that sales of the album as a whole were not prosecutable. Thompson also initiated a similar campaign in Boston. Later, Thompson would criticize the Republican Party for inviting N.W.A member and party donor Eric "Eazy-E" Wright to an exclusive function.
In 1992, Thompson was hired by the Freedom Alliance, a self-described patriot group founded by Oliver North, described as "far-right" by The Washington Post. By this time, Thompson was looking to have Time Warner, then being criticized for promoting the Ice-T song "Cop Killer", prosecuted for federal and state crimes such as sedition, incitement to riot, and "advocating overthrow of government" by distributing material that, in Thompson's view, advocated the killing of police officers. Time Warner eventually released Ice-T and his band from their contract, and voluntarily suspended distribution of the album on which "Cop Killer" was featured.
Thompson's push to label various musical performances obscene was not entirely limited to rap. In addition to taking on 2 Live Crew, Thompson campaigned against sales of the racy music video for Madonna's "Justify My Love". Then in 1996, he took on MTV broadcasts for "objectification of women" by writing to the station's corporate parent, Viacom, demanding a stop to what he called "corporate pollution". He also went after MTV's advertisers and urged the United States Army to pull recruiting commercials, citing the Army's recruitment of women and problems with sexual harassment scandals.
Video games
Thompson has heavily criticized a number of video games and campaigned against their producers and distributors. His basic argument is that violent video games have repeatedly been used by teenagers as "murder simulators" to rehearse violent plans. He has pointed to alleged connections between such games and a number of school massacres. According to Thompson, "In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers." Also, he claims that scientific studies show teenagers process the game environment differently from adults, leading to increased violence and copycat behavior. According to Thompson, "If some wacked-out adult wants to spend his time playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, one has to wonder why he doesn't get a life, but when it comes to kids, it has a demonstrable impact on their behavior and the development of the frontal lobes of their brain." Thompson has described the proliferation of games by Sony, a Japanese company, as "Pearl Harbor 2". According to Thompson, "Many parents think that stores won't sell an M-rated game to someone under 17. We know that's not true, and, in fact, kids roughly 50 percent of that time, all the studies show, are able to walk into any store and get any game regardless of the rating, no questions asked."
Thompson has rejected arguments that such video games are protected by freedom of expression, saying, "Murder simulators are not constitutionally protected speech. They're not even speech. They're dangerous physical appliances that teach a kid how to kill efficiently and to love it," as well as simply calling video games "mental masturbation". In addition, he has attributed part of the impetus for violent games to the military, saying that it was looking "for a way to disconnect in the soldier's mind the physical act of pulling the trigger from the awful reality that a life may end". Thompson further claims that some of these games are based on military training and simulation technologies, such as those being developed at the Institute for Creative Technologies, which, he suggests, were created by the Department of Defense to help overcome soldiers' inhibition to kill. He also claims that the PlayStation 2's DualShock controller "gives you a pleasurable buzz back into your hands with each kill. This is operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B. F. Skinner's laboratory."
Although his efforts dealing with video games have generally focused on juveniles, Thompson got involved in a case involving an adult on one occasion in 2004. This was an aggravated murder case against 29-year-old Charles McCoy Jr., the defendant in a series of highway shootings the previous year around Columbus, Ohio. When McCoy was captured, a game console and a copy of The Getaway were in his motel room. Although not representing McCoy and over the objections of McCoy's lawyers, Thompson succeeded in getting the court to unseal a search warrant for McCoy's residence. This showed, among other things, the discovery of additional games State of Emergency, Max Payne, and Dead to Rights. However, he was not allowed to present the evidence to McCoy, whose defense team was relying on an insanity defense based on paranoid schizophrenia. In Thompson's estimation, McCoy was the "functional equivalent of a 15-year-old," and "the only thing insane about this case is the (insanity) defense".
Early litigation
Thompson filed a lawsuit on behalf of the parents of three students killed in the Heath High School shooting in 1997. Investigations showed that the perpetrator, 14-year-old Michael Carneal, had regularly played various computer games (including Doom, Quake, Castle Wolfenstein, Redneck Rampage, Nightmare Creatures, MechWarrior, and Resident Evil) and accessed some pornographic websites. Carneal had also owned a videotape of The Basketball Diaries, which includes a high school student dreaming about shooting his teacher and some classmates. The suit sought $33 million in damages, alleging that the producers of the games, the movie, and the operators of the Internet sites were negligent in distributing this material to a minor because it would desensitize him and make him more prone to violence. Additional claims included product liability for making "defective" products (the defects alleged were violent features and lack of warnings) and violation of RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, for distributing this material to minors. Said Thompson, "We intend to hurt Hollywood. We intend to hurt the video game industry. We intend to hurt the sex porn sites."
The suit was filed in federal district court and was dismissed for failing to present a legally recognizable claim. The court concluded that Carneal's actions were not reasonably foreseeable by the defendants and that, in any case, his actions superseded those of the defendants, so the latter could not therefore be the proximate cause of the harm. In addition, the judge determined that "thoughts, ideas and images" in the defendants' materials did not constitute "products" that could be considered defective. The ruling was upheld on appeal.
Grand Theft Auto
Actions in law
Ohio
In February 2003, Thompson asked permission to file an amicus curiae (or "friend of the court") brief in the Ohio case of Dustin Lynch, 16, who was charged with aggravated murder in the death of JoLynn Mishne; Lynch was "obsessed" with Grand Theft Auto III. When Judge John Lohn ruled that Lynch would be tried as an adult, Thompson passed a message from Mishne's father to the judge, asserting that "the attorneys had better tell the jury about the violent video game that trained this kid [and] showed him how to kill our daughter, JoLynn. If they don't, I will."
In a motion sent to the prosecutor, the boy's court-appointed lawyer, and reporters, Thompson asked to be recognized as the boy's lawyer in the case. Medina County Prosecutor Dean Holman, however, said Thompson would be faced with deeply conflicting interests if he were to represent Dustin Lynch because he also advised Mishne's parents. Claiming that delays had weakened his case, Thompson asked Medina County Common Pleas Judge Christopher Collier to disqualify himself from presiding over the case because the judge had not ruled on Thompson's request for two months. The boy himself eventually rejected Thompson's offer, withdrawing his insanity plea. Lynch's mother, Jerrilyn Thomas, who had demanded that Collier appoint Thompson to defend her son, said she changed her mind after visiting with her son in jail, saying that the charge against him "has nothing to do with video games or Paxil, and my son's no murderer."
Tennessee
Thompson returned to file a lawsuit in Tennessee state court in October 2003 on behalf of the victims of two teenage stepbrothers who had pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, endangerment, and assault. Since the boys told investigators they were inspired by Grand Theft Auto III, Thompson sought $246 million in damages from the publisher, Take-Two Interactive, along with PlayStation 2 maker Sony Computer Entertainment America and retailer Wal-Mart. The suit charged that the defendants knew or should have known that the game would cause copycat violence. On October 22, 2003, the case was removed to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee. Two days later, the plaintiffs filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, and the case was closed.
Alabama
Thompson was involved in a similar suit in Alabama in 2005 on behalf of the families of police personnel killed by Devin Moore, a teenager who was reportedly a compulsive Grand Theft Auto player. The lawyer's participation in the case, however, ran into a dispute over his pro hac vice, or temporary, admission to practice in that state. The opposing attorneys sought removal of the privilege by arguing that Thompson's conduct was unethical and claiming that he had threatened and harassed them in letters and emails. The judge added that Thompson had violated his gag order during Moore's criminal trial. Thompson tried to withdraw from the case, but his request was denied by the judge, who went ahead and revoked Thompson's temporary admission to the state bar.
For his part, Thompson said he thought the judge was trying to protect Moore's criminal conviction at any cost. He also complained about the judge's ethics, saying a local attorney who claimed to have influence on the judge had assured him the case would be dismissed unless the attorney was on Thompson's team, and also claimed that Rockstar Entertainment and Take Two Interactive posted slanderous comments about him on their website.
In the aftermath of this lawsuit, Thompson lobbied Alabama attorney general Troy King to file a civil suit and call on retailers not to sell "cop-killing games". After the slaying of another police officer in Gassville, Arkansas by Jacob D. Robida, an 18-year-old fugitive, Thompson again raised the possibility of a connection to Grand Theft Auto, but investigators found no evidence that video games were involved.
Florida
Thompson once reported that he had videotaped a Miami Best Buy employee selling a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City to his son who was 10 at the time. In a letter to Best Buy, he wrote, "Prosecutions and public relations consequences should fall on your Minneapolis headquarters like snowflakes." He eventually sued the company in Florida, arguing that it had violated a law against sale of sexual materials deemed harmful to minors.
In January 2005, Best Buy agreed that it would enforce an existing policy to check the identification of anyone who appeared to be 17 or under and tried to purchase games rated "M" (for mature audiences). No law in effect at the time prohibited selling "M" rated video games to juveniles.
New Mexico
In September 2006, Thompson and attorney Steven Sanders filed a suit in Albuquerque, New Mexico, against Sony, Take-Two, Rockstar Games, and teenage killer Cody Posey, for the wrongful death of three members of Posey's family. The suit, on behalf of surviving family members, claimed that "obsessively" playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City made violence "pleasurable and attractive," disconnected violence from consequences, and caused Posey to "act out, copycat, replicate and emulate the violence" when in July 2004 he shot and killed his father, stepmother, and stepsister and then buried them under a manure pile. According to Thompson, "Posey essentially practiced how to kill on this game. If it wasn't for Grand Theft Auto, three people might not now be dead."
The suit claimed that Thompson had been told by a sheriff's deputy that the game and a Sony PlayStation 2 were found at the ranch. The suit also claimed that the game taught Posey "how to point and shoot a gun in a fashion making him an extraordinarily effective killer without teaching him any of the constraints or responsibilities needed to inhibit such a killing capacity." The game in question does not actually teach the player anything about handling a firearm. Gary Mitchell, Posey's attorney, said Thompson contacted him "numerous times" before the trial, urging him to highlight the game in Posey's defense, but Mitchell said he "just didn't find it had any merit whatsoever."
Take-Two reaction
On March 14, 2007, Take-Two filed a lawsuit seeking to permanently enjoin Thompson from filing any public nuisance action against the company that would block the sales to minors of the unreleased video games Grand Theft Auto IV and Manhunt 2. The suit alleged that Thompson's lawsuits violated the company's First Amendment rights.
Responding, Thompson said: "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, so arrogant, so dumb, even dumber than what they have to date done, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two." On April 19, 2007, Thompson and Take-Two settled the suit, with Thompson agreeing not to seek any legal restriction on sales of Take-Two's games, threaten to sue the company, or accuse Take-Two of any wrongdoing based on the sale of any of its games.
One analyst said that the settlement was likely to mute his public pronouncements and lawsuits against the company. However, upon the game's 2008 release, Thompson called Grand Theft Auto IV "the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio," and asked Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty to "pursue and file criminal charges against [Minnesota-based retailers] Target and Best Buy". He also sent a letter to Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick's attorney, addressed to Zelnick's mother, in which Thompson accused her son of "doing everything he possibly can to sell as many copies of GTA: IV to teen boys in the United States, a country in which your son claims you raised him to be a 'a Boy Scout'. ... More like the Hitler Youth, I would say." On May 1, 2008 Thompson appeared on the CNN Headline News program Glenn Beck, asserting that the game's sexual content made its sale to minors illegal, and that he was working with law enforcement to have criminal prosecutions brought. Thompson also filed a complaint with the Chicago Transit Authority about poster ads for the game at Chicago, Illinois bus stops.
GameZone emails
In September 2013, Thompson expressed his hatred of Grand Theft Auto V during a series of e-mails exchange with GameZone writer Lance Liebl during its launch week. The game happened to launch the day after the Washington Navy Yard shooting. Traditional media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC sought out to find proof that violent video games, such as Grand Theft Auto V, had a role in the brutal killings. GameZone responded by writing an article that disagrees with this. These caught Thompson's attention, who then sent an e-mail to the site. "Look, Lance," he wrote in an email, "The American Psychological Association has established a causal link between these games and increased aggression. The Dept. of Defense uses them for that purpose." Liebl responded by offering Thompson a chance to come on the site and explain his stance, which he refused, describing gamers as "too brain-impaired to get it."
Bully
Beginning in 2005, Thompson supported a campaign to discourage Take-Two's subsidiary, Rockstar Games, from releasing a game called Bully, in which, according to Thompson, "what you are in effect doing is rehearsing your physical revenge and violence against those whom you have been victimized by. And then you, like Klebold and Harris in Columbine, become the ultimate bully." According to Thompson, the game "shows you how to—by bullying—take over your school. You punch people; you hit them with sling shots; you dunk their heads in dirty toilets. There's white-on-black crime in the game. You bludgeon teachers and classmates with bats. It's absolutely nuts." Thompson sued Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, GameStop, and Toys 'R' Us, seeking an order to bar the game's release. He also participated in a protest at Rockstar's office that also included students from Peaceaholics, a Washington, D.C. mentoring organization. Thompson said he hoped that the pressure would get retailers to refuse to carry the game. In March 2006, the Miami-Dade County Public Schools board unanimously passed a resolution criticizing the game and urging retailers not to sell the game to minors.
Thompson also criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft for contracting with Rockstar Games to release the game on the Xbox. The Xbox version has since been cancelled for undisclosed reasons, but a version was released years later on the Xbox 360. In August 2006, Thompson requested a congressional subpoena for an early copy, threatening to file suit in Miami if he did not gain help from U.S. Rep. Cliff Stearns. Once the game is out, according to Thompson, "the horse will be out of the barn and it will be too late to do anything about it". Thompson argued that it violated Florida's public nuisance laws, which prohibit activities that can injure the health of the community.
Rockstar Games co-founder Terry Donovan responded, saying "I would prefer it if we could simply make great games and not have to deal with misunderstanding and misperception of what we do." After receiving no response from Rockstar regarding an advance copy, Thompson filed the public nuisance complaint against Wal-Mart, Take-Two Interactive, and GameStop, demanding that he be allowed to preview the game before its October 17 release date. Take-Two offered to bring in a copy and let both Judge Ronald Friedman and Thompson view the game in the judge's chambers on October 12, 2006. The judge ultimately saw no reason to restrict sales and dismissed the complaint the next day.
Thompson was critical of the judge's decision, telling the judge "You did not see the game... You don't even know what it was you saw," as well as accusing the Take-Two employee who demonstrated the game of avoiding the most violent parts. Blank Rome subsequently filed a motion to have Thompson's behavior declared "contempt for the court". Judge Friedman then recused himself from ruling, and instead filed a complaint against Thompson with The Florida Bar, calling Thompson's behavior "inappropriate by a member of the bar, unprofessional and contemptible".
Thompson later drew attention to the game's main character, a 15-year-old male, being able to kiss other boys. Thompson wrote to ESRB president Patricia Vance, "We just found gay sexual content in Bully as Jimmy Hopkins makes out with another male student. Good luck with your Teen rating now." The ESRB responded by saying they were already aware that the content was in the game when they rated it.
Manhunt
During the aftermath of the murder of Stefan Pakeerah, by his friend Warren Leblanc in Leicestershire, England, the game Manhunt was linked after the media wrongfully claimed police found a copy in Leblanc's room. The police officially denied any link, citing drug-related robbery as the motive and revealing that the game had been found in Pakeerah's bedroom, not Leblanc's. Thompson, who had heard of the murder, claimed that he had written to Rockstar after the game was released, warning them that the nature of the game could inspire copycat killings: "I wrote warning them that somebody was going to copycat the Manhunt game and kill somebody. We have had dozens of killings in the U.S. by children who had played these types of games. This is not an isolated incident. These types of games are basically murder simulators. There are people being killed over here almost on a daily basis." Soon thereafter, the Pakeerah family hired Thompson with the aim of suing Sony and Rockstar for £50 million in a wrongful death claim.
Jack Thompson would later vow to permanently ban the game during the release of the sequel Manhunt 2. Thompson said he planned to sue Take-Two/Rockstar in an effort to have both Manhunt 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV banned as "public nuisances", saying "killings have been specifically linked to Take-Two's Manhunt and Grand Theft Auto games. [I have] asked Take-Two and retailers to stop selling Take-Two's 'Mature' murder simulation games to kids. They all refuse. They are about to be told by a court of law that they must adhere to the logic of their own 'Mature' labels."
The suits were eradicated when Take-Two petitioned U.S. District Court, SD FL to block the impending lawsuit, on the grounds that video games purchased for private entertainment could not be considered public nuisances. The following day, Thompson wrote on his website "I have been praying, literally, that Take-Two and its lawyers would do something so stupid, that such a misstep would enable me to destroy Take-Two. The pit Take-Two has dug for itself will be patently clear next week when I strike back."
Mortal Kombat
In October 2006, Thompson sent a letter to Midway Games, demanding they cease and desist selling the latest game in the Mortal Kombat series, Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, claiming that the game was illegally profiting on his likeness, because gamers could use the character creation option to make a character who looked like Thompson. Midway did not respond to his letter.
Activism and lobbying
In addition to filing lawsuits, Thompson has pushed for measures against similar games in a variety of public settings. He wrote a joint article in the Christian Science Monitor with Eugene F. Provenzo, a University of Miami professor who studies the effects of video games on children. Originally brought together to provide opposing viewpoints on 60 Minutes in the aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, they said they had become friends and were collaborating on a book. They described themselves as having "a shared belief that first-person shooter video games are bad for our children, teaching them to act aggressively and providing them with efficient killing skills and romanticized and trivialized scenarios for killing in the real world".
Thompson has supported legislation in a number of states that would ban sales of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. In response to First Amendment concerns, he argued that the games were a "public safety hazard." However, he rejected as "completely unconstitutional" Hillary Clinton's proposed legislation to ban sales to minors of games rated "M" for Mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board. Thompson contended that the government could not enforce a private-sector standard but had to depend on a Miller obscenity test. He charged that Clinton was simply positioning herself politically, with the support of the gaming industry, by proposing a bill which he felt she knew would be unconstitutional.
In July 2005, Thompson sent a letter to several politicians urging them to investigate The Sims 2, alleging that the game contained nudity accessible by entering special codes. Thompson called the nudity inappropriate for a game rated "T" for Teen, a rating which indicates suitability for anyone 13 and older. Manufacturer Electronic Arts dismissed the allegations, with vice president Jeff Brown explaining that game characters have "no anatomical detail" under their clothes, effectively resembling Barbie dolls. Although the game does display blurred-out patches over body regions when characters are naked, such as when taking a shower, Brown said that was for "humorous effect" and denied there was anything improper about the game. Nevertheless, a command that could be entered into the in-game console in order to disable the blur effect was removed from the game in an expansion. No official reason was given for the change.
In Louisiana, Thompson helped draft a 2006 bill sponsored by state representative Roy Burrell to ban the sale of violent video games to buyers under 18 (HB1381). In an effort to avoid constitutional problems, it avoided trying to define "violent" and instead adopted a variation of the Miller obscenity test: sales to minors would be illegal based on community standards if the game appealed to "the minor's morbid interest in violence", was patently offensive based on adult standards of suitability for minors, and lacked serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors. The bill was passed unanimously by the state House and approved by the Senate Judiciary A Committee, despite industry opposition and predictions that it too would be unconstitutional. The Shreveport Times editorialized that Thompson's support of the bill "should immediately set off alarms" and described Thompson as someone who "thrives on chasing cultural ambulances". In defense of the bill, Thompson said that it was needed for public safety, and that it was a "miracle" that a Columbine-type event hadn't happened yet in Louisiana. However, the ESA filed suit under Entertainment Software Association v. Foti, and U.S. District Judge James Brady issued a preliminary injunction, temporarily blocking the law from taking effect until full judicial review can be done. The law was permanently enjoined in late November 2006, and the state was ordered to pay the legal fees of the plaintiffs. Judge Brady was "dumbfounded" that state legislators and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco wasted taxpayer money by trying to enact the law.
At one point, Thompson was asked by the National Institute on Media and the Family to stop invoking the organization's name in his campaigns. NIMF president David Walsh felt Thompson cast the organization in a bad light whenever he brought up their name. "Your commentary has included extreme hyperbole and your tactics have included personally attacking individuals for whom I have a great deal of respect," Walsh said in an open letter to Thompson.
Thompson has additionally worked to influence police investigations concerning violent acts which he views as being connected to violence in video games media. On June 2, 2006, Thompson suggested that West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana police detectives, investigating the murder of 55-year-old Michael Gore by 17-year-old Kurt Edward Neher, should look into the video games played by Neher. According to Sheriff J. Austin Daniel, an autopsy showed Gore was beaten to death as well as shot in the face. Concerning this, Thompson stated that "nobody shoots anybody in the face unless you're a hit man or a video gamer."
Other public commentary
Thompson predicted that the perpetrator of the Beltway sniper attacks would be "a teenaged boy, who plays video games" and speculated incorrectly that he "may indeed ride a bicycle to and from his shooting locations, his gun broken down and placed in a backpack while he pedals." Saying that the shooter, Lee Boyd Malvo, had "trained" on Halo, Thompson later claimed credit for this on The Today Show: "I predicted that the beltway sniper would be a teen-aged boy that trained on a game switched to sniper mode. And three months later, NBC reported that that's exactly what Malvo did. And Muhammad had him train on the game to suppress his inhibition to kill." John Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran and earned an expert marksmanship badge in the U.S. Army.
Thompson has also criticized a Christian video game based on the Left Behind series. In Left Behind: Eternal Forces, players participate in "battles raging in the streets of New York," according to the game's fact sheet. They engage in "physical and spiritual warfare: using the power of prayer to strengthen your troops in combat and wield modern military weaponry throughout the game world." Thompson claims that the makers of the game are sacrificing their values. He said, "Because of the Christian context, somehow it's OK? It's not OK. The context is irrelevant. It's a mass-killing game." Left Behind author Tim LaHaye disagrees, saying "Rather than forbid young people from viewing their favorite pastime, I prefer to give them something that's positive." The dispute over the game has caused Thompson to sever ties with Tyndale House, which publishes both the Left Behind books and Thompson's book, Out of Harm's Way. Thompson has not seen the game, which he says has "personally broken my heart," but claims, "I don't have to meet Abraham Lincoln to know that he was the 16th president of the United States."
In April 2007, only hours after the Virginia Tech shooting (and before Seung-Hui Cho was actually identified), Thompson predicted that the shooter had trained on the game Counter-Strike. According to Thompson, the game "drills you and gives you scenarios on how to kill them [and] gets you to kill them with your heart rate lower." He says that Seung-Hui "was in a hyper-reality situation in virtual reality." Though Seung-Hui had last been known to have played Counter-Strike in high school, four years prior to the shooting, Thompson asserts that "you don't drop it when you go to college, typically." Thompson disputed Seung-Hui's roommate's claim that Seung-Hui only used his computer to write fiction, on the grounds that "Cho was able to go room to room calmly, efficiently, coolly killing people." Prior to being identified, Thompson attributed the "flat effect on [Seung-Hui's] face" and the efficiency of his attack to video game rehearsals of the shooting. However, a search warrant released, listing the items found in Cho's dorm room, did not contain any video games, and a Washington Post story cited by Thompson later removed a paragraph stating that Seung-Hui enjoyed violent video games in high school. Despite all evidence indicating that Seung-Hui had not played Counter-Strike in years, Thompson continued to insist that "this is not rocket science. When a kid who has never killed anyone in his life goes on a rampage and looks like the Terminator, he's a video gamer." Thompson also sent a letter to Bill Gates, saying, "Mr. Gates, your company is potentially legally liable (for) the harm done at Virginia Tech. Your game, a killing simulator, according to the news that used to be in the Post, trained him to enjoy killing and how to kill." However, Microsoft did not create Counter-Strike – they only published the Xbox version of the game. The official Virginia state panel commissioned to investigate the shooting determined that Seung-Hui "played video games like Sonic the Hedgehog," and that "none of the video games [he had played] were war games or had violent themes."
In December 2007, Thompson filed suit against Omaha, Nebraska Police Chief Thomas Warren, asking him to produce information on all "violent entertainment material" belonging to Robert Hawkins, who killed nine people, including himself, in a shooting at the Westroads Mall earlier that month. According to Omaha police, such information is not a matter of public record, as it is part of an ongoing criminal investigation.
On February 15, 2008, Jack Thompson claimed that the actions of Steven Kazmierczak, who the previous day killed five people at Northern Illinois University before committing suicide, were influenced by the game Counter-Strike. In a subsequent news release, Thompson claimed that "We have a nation of Manchurian Candidate video gamers out there who are ready, willing, and able to massacre, and some of them will." Thompson also threatened the university with a lawsuit if the school did not provide copies of "all documents that reveal [Kazmierczak's] play of violent videogames."
Relationship with the gaming industry and gamers
Thompson's "high-profile crusades" have made him an enemy of video game aficionados. On occasion, Thompson has sparred directly with the gaming industry and its fans. In 2005, he wrote an open letter to Entertainment Software Association president Doug Lowenstein, making what he described as "a modest video game proposal" (an allusion to the title of Jonathan Swift's satirical essay, A Modest Proposal) to the video game industry: Thompson said he would donate $10,000 to a charity designated by Take-Two CEO Paul Eibeler if any video game company would create a game including the scenario he described in the letter. The scenario called for the main character, whose son was killed by a boy who played violent video games, to murder a number of industry executives (including one modeled on Eibeler) and go on a killing spree at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Video game fans promptly began working to take Thompson up on his offer, resulting in the game I'm O.K – A Murder Simulator, among others. Afterwards, he claimed that his proposal was satire, and refused to make the promised donation.
In response, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, the creators of gaming webcomic Penny Arcade and of the children's charity Child's Play, stepped in to make the $10,000 donation instead, writing in the memo field of their cheque, "For Jack Thompson, Because Jack Thompson Won't." Afterwards, Thompson tried unsuccessfully to get Seattle police and the FBI to investigate Holkins and Krahulik for orchestrating "criminal harassment" of him through articles on their site. Other webcomics have regularly incorporated references to Thompson, alluding to this incident as well as others.
In 2006, two Michigan gamers began a project dubbed "Flowers for Jack", soliciting donations to deliver a massive floral arrangement to Thompson's office. The flowers were delivered in February along with a letter aimed at opening a dialogue between Thompson and the video gaming community. Thompson rejected this overture and forwarded the flowers to some of his industry foes, with such comments as "Discard them along with the decency you discarded long ago. I really don't care. Grind them up and smoke them if you like."
Gamers have responded to Thompson's attempt to link the Virginia Tech massacre to the game Counter-Strike. Video game Web sites and young gamers on Internet message boards "teemed with anger" at what San Francisco Chronicle reporter Peter Hartlaub called "his serial misstatements," in some cases linking to YouTube videos of Thompson and dissecting his claims point by point. Jason Della Rocca, executive director of the International Game Developers Association, said, "It's so sad. These massacre chasers—they're worse than ambulance chasers—they're waiting for these things to happen so they can jump on their soapbox." In response, Thompson referred to Della Rocca as an "idiot" and a "jackass [...] paid not to connect the dots [connecting shootings to video games]," and compared himself to people who warned that the government should be more concerned about terrorism before the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to Della Rocca, Thompson then challenged him to a series of gaming debates, claiming that they could each make more than $3,000 per event. When Della Rocca suggested that neither he nor Thompson accept any money for the events, Thompson refused.
In July 2009, Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) president Hal Halpin posted a copy of an email exchange between himself and Thompson, stating, "I get messages (IMs, emails, FB notes, etc.) from members all the time, asking what the (almost daily) notes are from JT. Since this one's fairly harmless and I've redacted anything personal (not that I don't love getting his threatening cease and desist letters), I thought I'd share it as a pretty typical exchange." Halpin and Thompson have been vocal opponents since 1998, when Halpin ran the game retail trade association IEMA. The exchange was sparked by a guest editorial that Halpin entitled, "Perception is Everything" for IndustryGamers.com where he called for consumers and the industry to speak out against negative stereotyping of gamers.
In March 2011, in response to the creation of a school shooter mod entitled School Shooter: North American Tour 2012, developed by Checkerboarded Studios on Valve's Source engine, Thompson emailed Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, demanding that the mod be removed, as he speculated that Valve played a part in the mod's development. In the letter, Thompson stated that Half-Life was directly responsible for the Erfurt school massacre, as well as the Virginia Tech massacre and that Valve had until 5:00p.m. on March18 to remove the mod.
The Howard Stern Show
In 2004, Thompson helped get Howard Stern's show taken off a radio station in Orlando, Florida by filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission. Thompson objected to Stern's use of perceived obscenities on the air. He argued that "Either broadcasters will accept the light harness of decency that has been the law for decades and start cleaning up their acts, or the public's deepening outrage will foster a more fearsome governmental response." Thompson claimed to have received death threats from listeners of Stern's show, noting that "you'd expect that considering the IQ of people who listen to Howard Stern. Apparently they fail to realize that I might have caller ID."
During his opposition to Howard Stern, Thompson was asked in an interview with a reporter if, by his standards, he would blame Christianity for the murders committed by Michael Hernandez, a fourteen-year-old who murdered one of his classmates in 2004, because Hernandez wrote a diary in which he constantly spoke about praying to God. Thompson replied, "The Bible doesn't promote killing innocent people, Grand Theft Auto does. Islam does." Thompson then expanded his comments in the same interview by saying, "Islam promotes the killing of innocent people. The Quran requires the infidel, whether Jew or Christian, to be killed. ... That's a core essence of the religion. ... Muhammad was a pirate who killed infidels and who advocated the killing of infidels—not a nice guy. Osama bin Laden is in keeping with his fine tradition."
He later spoke in defense of Stern during the latter's legal dispute with CBS over promoting Sirius on-air before his switch to satellite radio. Thompson contended that the technology added by CBS to edit out profanity also could have worked to edit out Stern's references to Sirius. According to Thompson, "The reason why CBS chose not to edit Stern is that Stern's Arbitron ratings remained high and were arguably even enhanced by people tuning in to hear daily about Stern's running feud with CBS and his move to Sirius. In other words, CBS actually used Stern's discussion of his move to Sirius to make more money for CBS."
CBS President Leslie Moonves responded, saying "You know what? You can't let people like that tell you what to put on the air or what not to put on the air. That would only open the door when suddenly next week, he says, 'Take David Letterman off the air or take C.S.I. off the air.' Or you know what? Everybody Loves Raymond was about, you know, sex last week or about a 70-year-old man—you know, we dealt with Peter Boyle having sex with Doris Roberts. 'Take that off the air.' That's something we can't let happen."
The Florida Bar
Actions against the bar
In 1993, Thompson asked a Florida judge to declare The Florida Bar unconstitutional. He said that the Bar was engaged in a vendetta against him because of his religious beliefs, which he said conflicted with what he called the Bar's pro-gay, humanist, liberal agenda. He also said that the "wedding of all three functions of government into The Florida Bar, the 'official arm' of the Florida Supreme Court, is violative of the bedrock constitutional requirement of the separation powers and the 'checks and balances' which the separation guarantees." Thompson accepted a $20,000 out-of-court settlement.
On January 7, 2002, Thompson sent the Supreme Court of Florida a letter regarding The Florida Bar's actions. The letter was filed with the court on January 10, 2002 and was treated as a petition for a writ of mandamus against The Florida Bar. Before any action was taken on the petition, Thompson sent the court another letter on January 28, 2002 voluntarily dismissing the case. The letter was filed with the court on January 30, 2002, and the Florida Supreme Court issued an order of dismissal on February 28, 2002.
In January 2006, Thompson asked the Justice Department to investigate The Florida Bar's actions. "The Florida Bar and its agents have engaged in a documented pattern of this illegal activity, which may sink to the level of criminal racketeering activity, in a knowing and illegal effort to chill my federal First Amendment rights," Thompson wrote in a letter to Alex Acosta, interim U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida.
In April 2006, Thompson filed another suit against The Florida Bar, this time in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, alleging that the Bar harassed him by investigating what he called baseless complaints made by disgruntled opponents in previous disputes. His five-count complaint asked for more than $1 million in damages. The lawsuit alleged that the Bar was pursuing baseless ethics complaints brought against Thompson by Tew Cardenas attorneys Lawrence Kellogg and Alberto Cardenas of Miami, and by two lawyers from the Philadelphia office of Blank Rome, in violation of Thompson's constitutional rights. According to the lawsuit, the Bar looked at Thompson for violations of a bar rule that prohibits attorneys from making disparaging remarks about judges, other attorneys, or court personnel. Thompson also filed a motion with the court to order the mediation of his dispute with the Bar. Thompson commented, "I enjoy doing what I do and I think I've got a First Amendment right to annoy people and participate in the public square in the cultural war." Thompson also said he is optimistic his federal lawsuit will be successful. "I'm 100 percent certain that it will effect change, otherwise I would not have filed it."
On April 25, 2006, The Florida Bar filed a motion to dismiss Thompson's complaint. The Bar argued that Thompson's complaint should be dismissed for a number of reasons, including the fact that the complaint failed to state a claim on which he could be granted relief. The Bar also argued that it was absolutely immune from liability for actions arising out of its disciplinary functions, that the Eleventh Amendment barred Thompson's recovery of damages, and that the court should dismiss the case pursuant to the abstention doctrine of Younger v. Harris. On May 4, 2006, Thompson filed a motion asking Judge Federico Moreno to recuse himself from the case, as Judge Moreno was a member of The Florida Bar. Citing an "abundance of caution," Judge Moreno recused himself on May 9, 2006 and referred the case to Chief Judge William Zloch for further action. Thompson did not, however, respond to the Bar's motion to dismiss the case. Finally, on May 17, 2006, Thompson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal with the court, and the case was dismissed without prejudice.
Filings
In October 2007, then-Chief U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sealed court documents submitted by Thompson in the Bar case that depicted "gay sex acts." Thompson's submission prompted U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan to order Thompson to show cause why his actions should not be filed as a grievance with the court's Ad Hoc Committee on Attorney Admissions, Peer Review and Attorney Grievance, but the order was dismissed after Thompson promised not to file any more pornography. Thompson then sent letters to acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and U.S. Senators Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter demanding that Jordan be removed from his position for failing to prosecute Florida attorney Norm Kent, who Thompson claimed had "collaborated" with the Bar for 20 years to discipline him.
In February 2008, the Florida Supreme Court ordered Thompson to show cause as to why it should not reject future court filings from him unless they are signed by another The Florida Bar member. The Florida Supreme Court described his filings as "repetitive, frivolous and insult[ing to] the integrity of the court," particularly one in which Thompson, claiming concern about "the court's inability to comprehend his arguments," filed a motion which he called "A picture book for adults", including images of "swastikas, kangaroos in court, a reproduced dollar bill, cartoon squirrels, Paul Simon, Paul Newman, Ray Charles, a handprint with the word 'slap' written under it, Bar Governor Benedict P. Kuehne, Ed Bradley, Jack Nicholson, Justice Clarence Thomas, Julius Caesar, monkeys, [and] a house of cards." (see ) Thompson claimed that the order "wildly infringes" on his constitutional rights and was "a brazen attempt" to repeal the First Amendment right to petition the government to redress grievances. In response, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey, referring to the show-cause order as a criminal act done in retaliation for his seeking relief with the court.
On March 20, 2008, the Florida Supreme Court imposed sanctions on Thompson, requiring that any of his future filings in the court be signed by a member of The Florida Bar other than himself. The court noted that Thompson had responded to the show cause order with multiple "rambling, argumentative, and contemptuous" responses that characterized the show cause order as "bizarre" and "idiotic."
Disbarment
In February 2007, The Florida Bar filed disbarment proceedings against Thompson over allegations of professional misconduct. The action was the result of separate grievances filed by people claiming that Thompson made defamatory, false statements and attempted to humiliate, embarrass, harass or intimidate them. According to the complaint, Thompson accused Alberto Cardenas of "distribution of pornography to children", claimed that the Alabama judge presiding over the Devin Moore case "breaks the rules, even the Alabama State Bar Rules, because he thinks that the rules don't apply to him", and sent a letter to Blank Rome's managing partner, saying, "Your law firm has actively and knowingly facilitated by various means the criminal distribution of sexual material to minors." Thompson claims that the complaints violate state religious protections because his advocacy is motivated by his Christian faith.
In May 2008, Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Dava Tunis, after reviewing 2,400 pages of transcripts and 1,700 pages of exhibits, recommended that Thompson be found guilty of 27 of the 31 violations of which he had been accused, including making false statements to tribunals, disparaging and humiliating litigants and other lawyers, and improperly practicing law outside of Florida. Thompson filed a motion with the Florida Supreme Court the day after the report was issued to strike Tunis' recommendations as vague for lack of detail. Previously, Thompson had attempted to have Tunis thrown off his case, and filed a complaint against her with the state Judicial Qualifications Commission, which is responsible for investigating judges.
On June 4, 2008, prosecutor Sheila Tuma recommended 'enhanced disbarment' for Thompson, saying that Thompson demonstrated continued misconduct, a pattern of misconduct and persistently failed to admit any wrongdoing. Enhanced disbarment lengthens the period before an attorney may reapply for admission to the bar from five years to ten. After being prevented from making a speech to begin the disciplinary hearing, Thompson distributed his written objections to lawyers, a court reporter, and a newspaper reporter, departed the courtroom, and called the proceedings against him a "star chamber" and "kangaroo court".
On July 8, 2008, Judge Tunis recommended permanent disbarment and a $43,675.35 fine for Thompson to the Florida Supreme Court, citing "cumulative misconduct, a repeated pattern of behavior relentlessly forced upon numerous unconnected individuals, a total lack of remorse or even slight acknowledgment of inappropriate conduct, and continued behavior consistent with the previous public reprimand... Over a very extended period of time involving a number of totally unrelated cases and individuals, the Respondent has demonstrated a pattern of conduct to strike out harshly, extensively, repeatedly and willfully to simply try to bring as much difficulty, distraction and anguish to those he considers in opposition to his causes... He does not proceed within the guidelines of appropriate professional behavior, but rather uses other means available to intimidate, harass, or bring public disrepute to those whom he perceives oppose him." The court approved the recommendation and fine on September 25, 2008, and ordered that Thompson be permanently disbarred effective 30 days from the date of the order so Thompson could close out his practice. He later filed for an emergency stay of the Florida Supreme Court's order with the U.S. District Court, which was ultimately denied. In an e-mail to media outlets, Thompson responded to the court's decision by stating, "The timing of this disbarment transparently reveals its motivation: this past Friday Thompson filed a federal civil rights action against The Bar, the Supreme Court, and all seven of its Justices. This rush to disbarment is in retribution for the filing of that federal suit. With enemies this foolish, Thompson needs only the loyal friends he has." He closed the email—in which he included the court ruling—with, "...this should be fun, starting now".
On September 19, 2009, Thompson announced that he intended to resume practicing law as of October 1, 2009, claiming that he was "never disbarred" because all of the orders resulting in his disbarment were legal nullities. He dared The Florida Bar to get a court order to stop him.
Other activities
In 1992, a complaint from Thompson led Florida Secretary of State Jim Smith to withhold a $25,000 grant to the Miami Film Festival; Thompson claimed that the festival was using state money to show pornographic films. In response, Thompson was named an "Art Censor of the Year" by the ACLU. The next month, Thompson faced disbarment over allegations that he lied while making accusations against prominent Dade County lawyer Stuart Z Grossman. Thompson ultimately admitted violating bar rules of professional conduct, including charges that he contacted people represented by an attorney without first contacting their attorneys, and agreed to pay $3,000 in fines and receive a public reprimand.
In 1999, Thompson represented the parents of Bryce Kilduff, an 11-year-old boy who committed suicide by hanging himself. Police believed that the death was an accident, and that Kilduff was imitating Kenny, a character from the Comedy Central series South Park, which Bryce, according to his parents, had never watched. Thompson called for Comedy Central to stop marketing the show and toys based on the series to children. "You see, the whole show—thrust of the show is it's—it's cool for kids to act like the characters in South Park."
Prior to Thompson's disbarment, attorney Norm Kent filed a personal lawsuit against him, which eventually resulted in Thompson paying Kent $50,000 for defamation. Thompson reacted to the suit by threatening employees at one of Kent's clients, Beasley Broadcast Group, with lawsuits and depositions unless they got Kent to drop his case.
In January 2005, Beasley hired attorney Lawrence A. Kellogg of law firm Tew Cardenas, LLP, to manage Thompson's threats. Because Kellogg delayed arranging a meeting with him, Thompson on March 17 began a campaign targeting the firm's name partner Al Cardenas, a former chair of the Republican Party of Florida, accusing him of personally being involved in "a statewide racketeering activity" in a letter sent to the media, Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist, and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. Kellogg then filed a complaint to The Florida Bar that figured largely in Thompson's disbarment.
On April 30, Thompson extended his campaign against Cardenas to an attempt at embarrassing him as a trustee of Florida A&M University, a historically black university. In an email sent to FAMU interim president Castell V. Bryant, the media, the FCC, and Governor Bush, he cites racist remarks made by a caller to The Howard Stern Show to suggest that Cardenas put "profit ahead of race relations", even though Beasley, which owned a station broadcasting Stern's show, was not among Al Cardenas's clients.
On February 21, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the Florida Judicial Qualifications Commission against Judge Larry Seidlin, accusing Seidlin of "violating nearly every judicial canon" in conducting a hearing on the disposition of the body of Anna Nicole Smith. On June 28, 2007, Thompson filed a complaint with the State Attorney's Office, asking for an investigation and possible prosecution regarding accusations that Seidlin inappropriately accepted expensive gifts.
In March 2008, Thompson called for the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate Division to immediately suspend the law license of former state governor Eliot Spitzer, who had resigned from the position amidst reports he was a client of a prostitution ring. Thompson said that the Disciplinary Committee for the Appellate Division's First Department should stop Spitzer from practicing law until the matter was resolved, noting that Spitzer did not claim innocence in his initial public apology.
In an April 2016 interview with Inverse, Thompson stated that he was teaching civics classes to inmates in the Florida prison system, including an American history and constitutional law class at the Everglades Correctional Institution.
Facebook lawsuit
Thompson filed a lawsuit for $40 million against Facebook in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on September 29, 2009. Thompson claimed that the social networking site had caused him "great harm and distress" by not removing angry postings made by users in several Facebook groups. Thompson withdrew his case less than two months later. According to Parry Aftab, a cyber-law attorney, Thompson would likely not have had any success because the U.S. Communications Decency Act provides that companies such as Facebook have no liability for what users do with their services in most cases.
Bibliography
Out of Harm's Way. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2005. .
See also
James v. Meow Media – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Strickland v. Sony – Thompson represented the plaintiffs.
Jacob Robida – Thompson commented to the media about the case.
GamePolitics.com – Frequently covered Thompson.
Spencer Halpin's Moral Kombat – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
Playing Columbine – Thompson is interviewed in the documentary.
References
External links
The Florida Bar's Member page of John Bruce Thompson
Jack Thompson versus Adam Sessler on G4's Attack of the Show!
Jack Thompson vs Paul Levinson on CNBC
Thompson interviewed on Free Talk Live
1951 births
Denison University alumni
Living people
American activists
American Christians
Video game censorship
Florida lawyers
Lawyers from Cleveland
Disbarred American lawyers
Vanderbilt University alumni
People from Coral Gables, Florida
Activists from Ohio
| true |
[
"\"Not OK!\" is a song by American alternative artist Chaz Cardigan. The song was recorded for Cardigan's debut EP, Vulnerabilia, and served as its lead single.\n\nBackground \n\"Not OK!\" was written by Chaz Cardigan and Todd Clark in 2018. Cardigan has explained that the song was written after he'd started regularly attending Jungian therapy. “I was in this really intense place of picking apart some of my bad habits, the walls I felt like I kept coming up against,\" he says. \"So instead of feeling down on myself or feeling guilty for these things in my life I didn't like, I would think, why am I this way? And then in that unpacking, realizing that, actually, no one knows what we're doing. There's no magical level you get to in life where it all starts to make sense. So why pretend that we're put together? That’s what it’s about for me.”\n\nMusic videos \nThe single was originally accompanied by an official video directed by Al Kalyk. The video featured Cardigan in a bathtub full of gummy bears. After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, a \"quarantine edition\" video was released, directed by Will Kindrick. The re-imagined video featured footage of Cardigan, his band, and fans shot entirely on mobile phone cameras.\n\nCharts\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links \n\n Official video\n Quarantine video\n\n2020 songs\n2020 debut singles\nCapitol Records singles\nSongs written by Todd Clark\n2020 singles",
"Darkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder is a first-person 3D adventure / horror thriller video game. It takes place in an imaginary \"Lovecraftian\" place called Wellsmoth. As police detective Howard E. Loreid, players are tasked to solve the murder of Clark Field, a wealthy man involved in the occult. At the top of their list of suspects is Loath Nolder, a highly respected private investigator who mysteriously abandoned his last case for reasons unknown. Rumor had it that he ventured to several exotic places around the world. It remains a great mystery as to why Loath Nolder disappeared so suddenly, resurfacing five years later and resuming his investigations just as abruptly as he had left them. Why does this venerated P.I. now sit on the other side of the law?\n\nThis seemingly routine investigation takes a dramatic twist as strange and terrifying happenings begin to plague the player's psyche. They experience lucid horrifying dreams and are tormented by paranormal happenings. Why do days pass instead of hours when the player sleeps? What's real and what's not? As they pursue fugitive murder suspect Loath Nolder, they must face dire truths hidden deep within a haunting darkness and the recesses of their mind.\n\nIt is the first in an expected series of three games. The second game being Darkness Within 2: The Dark Lineage.\n\nThe story of the game was written with the impressions of the writer H. P. Lovecraft’s works. \nThe game was temporarily without a publisher when Lighthouse Interactive went out of business. \nOn June 2, 2009 it was announced that Iceberg Interactive acquired the publishing rights to this game.\n\nDarkness Within was republished on November 14 on Steam with enhanced graphics and some more additions.\n\nOn November 3, 2015, original soundtracks of both Darkness Within 1 & 2 were officially released on Steam by Zoetrope.\n\nReception\n\nDarkness Within: In Pursuit of Loath Nolder received mixed reviews upon its original release. On Metacritic, the game holds a score of 52/100 based on 15 reviews, indicating \"mixed or average reviews.\" On GameRankings, the game holds a score of 55.50% based on 14 reviews.\n\nIGN's Charles Onyett gave the game a 5.1/10, strongly criticizing the game's graphics for being \"intensely low-budget\" but praising the sound design and voice acting. Brett Todd of GameSpot was even more critical of the game, giving it a 3.5/10 while pointing out the game's lack of scares and its \"bland locations and graphics.\"\n\nReferences\n\nExternal links\n Darkness Within official website\n Official demo download from GamersHell.com\n Trailer from GameTrailers.com\n\n Iceberg Interactive\n\n2007 video games\nAdventure games\nFirst-person adventure games\nHorror video games\nPoint-and-click adventure games\nSingle-player video games\nVideo games developed in Turkey\nVideo games set in 2011\nWindows games\nVideo games about police officers\nVideo games based on works by H. P. Lovecraft\nIceberg Interactive games"
] |
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